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THE CHRISTIAN METHOD 
OF ETHICS 



THE CHRISTIAN METHOD 
OF ETHICS 



BY 

HENRY W. CLARK 

AUTHOR OF 

** THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCB " 
MEANINGS AND METHODS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
ETC., ETC. 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 1908, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W- 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 





NOTE 



THIS book assumes the positions which were 
dealt with at greater length in a previous 
one, The Philosophy of Christian Experience; and 
reference is made to that previous volume here 
and there. It is not meant, however, that those 
who are unacquainted with The Philosophy of 
Christian Experience will be at any loss in follow- 
ing the present pages. But they will have to take 
for granted certain things which are in the former 
volume more fully drawn out. 

Incorporated in the following pages are some 
passages from papers which have at different 
times appeared in The Expositor and The Chris- 
tian World, My thanks are due to the Editors of 
these journals for their kind permission to reprint. 



H. W. C. 



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CONTENTS 

CHAPTER. PAGE 

I. The Ideal and the Ideals 9 

II. The Ultimate Ethical Ideal 31 

III. The Religious Programme and the Ultimate 

Ethical Ideal 54 

IV. The Christian Conscience 78 

V. Christian Distinctiveness io6 

VI. The Christian's Relation to the World . 129 

{a) The Christian and Material Good . 133 

(b) The Christian and the Secular World 146 

(c) The Christian and the Shortness of 
Life 162 

VII. The Christian's Relation to his Fellow-Men 172 

{a) The Law of Love 174 

{b) Love and Strength 193 

{c) The Christian and Judgment of Others 200 

(d) The Christian and Influence . . . 210 

VIII. The Christian and Discipline 220 

IX. Summary— The Inclusive Rule 236 



THE CHRISTIAN METHOD 
OF ETHICS 

I 

THE IDEAL AND THE IDEALS 
I 

IT is a matter of common observation and ex- 
perience that the Christian man finds it almost, 
or quite, as difficult as does any one else to 
adjust himself to a true position among the vari- 
ous practical problems of his days. Somehow 
or other, notwithstanding all the reinforcement 
of knowledge and of power which he would 
claim to have received through his entrance into 
the Christian kingdom, he is often utterly at a 
loss as to the course he ought to pursue. What- 
ever change may have been wrought in him by 
his faith in Christ has not enabled him to discern 
— still less to carry out — the true programme in 
all the emergencies of the common life. The 
inward processes whereby he became a Christian 
disciple seem to have left him much as he was 
so far as concerns his capability of setting himself 
right with experience as a whole : the adjustments 
of soul which he has made in obedience to the 



10 THE CHEISTIAX METHOD OF ETHICS 

call of religion do not appear to count for very 
much in the way of inspiration when he stands 
face to face with the problems brought upon him 
by his life in the ordinary world ; nor does he feel 
himself invested with any special power of self- 
regulation, beyond that of other men, amid the 
dif¥erent sets of emergencies that are constantly 
presenting themselves to bewildered human 
thought. A religious settlement of life, in other 
words, does not seem to bring a complete ethical 
settlement of life in its train. Of course, the 
elementary virtues of truth, honesty, sobriety, 
and the rest are not referred to when this is 
said. These may be taken for granted; and, 
indeed, the Christian man would not expect, and 
does not need, in matters like these, to have any 
clearer illumination than that possessed by any 
one else. But these things are the mere alphabet 
of any practical and ethical scheme. And beyond 
these things, when life passes on into more com- 
plex, though not less essentially practical, realms — 
when it becomes a matter of finding the right poise 
of nature and the true line of conduct in affairs 
of a subtler kind — then the Christian man discov- 
ers that, precisely where he could wish to show 
himself possessed of a secret denied to others, he 
is as much in the dark as they. In regard to a 
right bearing in sorrow, in regard to the obser\'- 
ance of a true proportion between the material 



THE IDEAL AND THE IDEALS 11 



and the higher interests of Hfe, in regard to the 
maintenance of correct relations between man and 
man — in such matters as these, to take only a 
few instances, the Christian man feels himself in 
no position of decided advantage over the rest. 
He is, it is true, in possession of general princi- 
ples which may cover a wider range and point 
to loftier altitudes than those held by many. He 
knows that all things are somehow to be made to 
work together for his good. He knows that a 
man's life consists not in the abundance of the 
things he possesseth, and that the spirit which is 
prepared to count all things but dross if heaven 
so ordains, and to take up the cross if the call shall 
come, is the spirit by which he is to be ruled. He 
knows that the law of his relations with his fellow- 
men is to be the law of love. But it is in the ap- 
plication of the general principles, in any given 
concrete instance, that he finds himself at a loss. 
Whether under a particular set of circumstances 
they call for immediate and positive action, and 
if so in what degree; by what line of conduct 
they may best be carried out; to what extent 
they are to be co-operative in the government of 
a special crisis ; what is the mood and emotion they 
call for in order that, so far as they depend upon 
these things, they may not fail — the Christian 
man, after he has grasped his general principles, 
has still these questions to face. He finds himself 



12 THE CHEISTIAX METHOD OF ETHICS 

as bewildered as the rest: indeed, the general 
principles he has acquired not seldom seem to 
be themselves the source of added difficulty, inas- 
much as they complicate the case by setting the 
standard so high and thus imposing a greater 
responsibility and a severer test. In brief, the 
fact that a man has become a Christian disciple 
is by no means an open sesame for all doors. He 
appears to be in precisely the same position, in 
regard to life's practical problems, as those who 
do not definitely adopt the Christian attitude at 
all. He begins his working out of each sum, so 
to say, at much the same point as they ; and, inas- 
much as he has no book of infallible answers at 
his command, he is as liable as are others to be 
mistaken when all his calculations are done. 

Yet the Christian man knows full well that this 
should not be; and he feels instinctively that for 
every one of life's emergencies his programme 
ought to be clear. Precisely because Christianity 
is so much more than an ethical system, it ought 
to solve — automatically, in fact — all ethical prob- 
lems: it should possess, within that professedly 
all-sufficing ministry of transformation which it 
brings to bear on human life, a full range of 
ethical implications ; and these implications should 
be easily discernible by any one who claims to 
have learnt the Christian secret and to have made 
the inward adjustments which Christianity pre- 



THE IDEAL AND THE IDEALS 13 

scribes. To enter into right relations with God 
(and this is what the Christian man claims to 
have done) ought to carry with it the attain- 
ment and the maintenance of right relations with 
the world, with all other inhabitants of it, and 
with every element of experience. The greater 
must include the less. There can be no such dual- 
ism involved in right living as is implied when the 
religious adjustment of a man's nature leaves 
him still at the beginning of his pupilage in regard 
to general practical concerns, brings to birth in 
him no reliable sense of direction amid life's tan- 
gled ways, and imparts no sufficient momentum 
to carry him past the sloughs and up the steep 
places and through the oft-recurring mists and 
glooms. So, instinctively, the Christian man 
feels. And, indeed, Christianity itself, as it has 
become articulate in its sacred writings, appears 
to take matters in the same way. For when it al- 
ludes to practical matters, to ethical concerns, to 
the varying crises of human experience, it does 
so as if by the way — never, of course, as think- 
ing these things unimportant, but rather as hold- 
ing that the Christian disciple's right self-man- 
agement among these things may be taken for 
granted. When Paul declares that " all things 
work together for good to them that love God," 
he does so as if uttering a platitude, and as assum- 
ing that the Christian will know, in intellect and in 



14 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

experience, the truth of what he declares. When 
John emphasises the idea that " we know that we 
have passed out of death into hfe, because we love 
the brethren," the very form in which he casts his 
statement implies that a right relation to one'j^ 
fellow-men ought to follow automatically from a 
right relation to the Christian gospel. And while 
exhortations to practical virtues do lie scattered 
thickly upon the New Testament pages, there are 
prescribed, for the attainment of power to carry 
them out, no programmes of self-discipline other 
than the spiritual programme whereby a man 
becomes, in the first instance, entitled to the 
Christian name, — the inference being that if that 
spiritual programme be sincerely observed, all is 
done in the way of self-discipline that even ethical 
perfection requires. The exhortations, too (it is 
worth noting, for the fact is a striking one) , are 
always concerned with the simplest and most 
obvious duties, as if they had been constructed 
merely in view of the danger of theoretical Chris- 
tian belief without real Christian life. It is not the 
method of virtue, but simply insistence on the fact 
that virtue will be there if the Christian profes- 
sion be genuine, with which the writer — James, 
for instance — is concerned ; and he selects, there- 
fore, the more elementary graces for the pointing 
of his case. The larger crises of life, the subtler 
problems, the seemingly complicated emergencies 



THE IDEAL AND THE IDEALS 15 

in which the Christian of to-day so often finds 
himself puzzled, are, if dealt with at all, dealt with 
in the almost casual fashion indicated above^ — as 
though the New Testament writers felt that whoso 
had gone deeply enough into Christianity to care 
for a Christian bearing in such things as these 
would find himself automatically set into a true 
attitude as each crisis arrived. And all this 
confirms the Christian's instinctive feeling that 
his bewilderment, when he faces many of the 
practical problems of life, is a thing from which 
he ought to be free. It is not right that he should 
be thus compelled, when his relations to some 
element of his environment grow complicated, to 
begin all over again. It is not right that he 
should, notwithstanding his acceptance of a pro- 
fessedly all-suffering system of soul-adjustment, 
find himself without any advantage over the man 
by whom no such acceptance and no such adjust- 
ment of soul have been made. It is not right that 
the only thing his religion gives him as extra 
weapons wherewith to fight his way through the 
difficulties of a growingly complex existence 
should be a somewhat heightened emotion and a 
stronger belief that all will turn out well in the 
end. If Christianity did its perfect work, the 
Christian would be, not only in anticipation, but 
in actual present fact, conqueror over all, and 
would always be able to say, whatever the ques- 



16 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

tion of the moment might be, " This one thing 
I do." 

II 

The fundamental reason for the common lack 
of adequate equipment on the ethical side lies in 
the fact that the Christian's ethical programme is 
not sought for in the right way. The ethical or 
practical side of the Christian's life is looked upon 
as a thing detached; and it is not perceived that 
Christian practical ideals are rightly formulated 
only when they are translations into terms of 
practical life on the one religious ideal — that they 
ought to be, in fact, the one religious ideal dressed 
to play its part upon the practical stage. What 
we want is a unifying of our ideals — a unifying 
of them for the intellect, first, and thereafter, of 
course, an application of the all-inclusive ideal to 
each ethical problem as it comes up. We want 
to understand how one ideal includes all — how all 
ideals flow from one. We want to get at the 
varied processes of self-adjustment to practical 
problems, as the Christian man should practise 
those processes, by realising how they are inevi- 
tably implied in the conception of the main spir- 
itual process, and how they really involve pre- 
cisely the same movement of the soul. We want 
to see how the religious self-adjustment which 
Christianity calls for suggests and includes within 



THE IDEAL AND THE IDEALS 17 



itself all the minor self-adjustments required as 
experience passes on. The minor self-adjust- 
ments, they are advisedly termed; for minor, in 
the sense of being merely adjuncts to the larger 
and dominating self-adjustment, they would, in 
a true view of things, at once declare themselves 
to be. We want, at any rate, to understand that 
in addressing ourselves to the ethical question 
we are really addressing ourselves to the religious 
question — that the solution of the first is to be 
sought with the solution of the second kept in 
view — that the two questions are not two, but one. 
The ethical movement in any given case must be 
conceived as a special movement within a re- 
ligious movement which covers all cases, a move- 
ment bracketed, as it were, within the larger 
whole. The true bearing of the Christian man 
among all the practical problems of his life is 
discovered only when we seek it away from the 
practical problems themselves, in the one spiritual 
ideal which the Christian gospel holds up. The 
ethical ideals should not need, for their investiga- 
tion, a fresh start: they should be reached by a 
translation into appropriate terms of the religious 
ideal already apprehended. We need to perceive 
the ethical programme bound up with the re- 
ligious, and the religious suggesting the ethical; 
and the mind should be conscious, in passing to 
and fro between the two, that it is but flitting 



18 THE CHEISTIAX METHOD OF ETHICS 

from one apartment to another in the same house. 
W e are on the wrong track so long as we merely 
try to carry over from religion into the ethical 
investigation some new spirit, some new mental or 
moral equipment, which will assist us, we hope, 
to carry the investigation through with success. 
All ideals are to be but translations or applica- 
tions of the one ideal. 

It is important that this should be understood. 
It is not, let it be emphasised, simply a matter of 
finding the practical consequences of Christian 
doctrine. To put it that way still leaves a break 
between the doctrine and the practical programme 
— a point at which the mind comes to the close 
of one investigation and takes up the next — in- 
deed, the Yery statement of the problem in these 
terms implies that the bridging of a gulf between 
two separated things is the aim in view. And it is 
because this position is accepted that the ethical 
ideals of Christian men remain hazy, and ethical 
investigations are too frequently unsatisfying in 
their results. Whsit is needed is not an acceptance 
of a gulf between the religious programme and the 
practical programme, followed by an attempt to 
bridge it, but an appreciation of the fact that gulf 
there is none. A study of the ethical side of life, 
from the Christian point of view, must start from 
the conviction that an ethical programme is 
reached, not by a process of more or less uncertain 



THE IDEAL ANT) THE IDEALS 19 

inference, but by a completer unfolding of the 
religious programme and its significance, and by 
a taking into the practical field of what that pro- 
gramme prescribes. The spiritual ideal and the 
ethical ideals should be given together for the in- 
quiring mind. We want an extension of the field 
of the primary spiritual dynamic : at any rate, we 
want to see how the primary spiritual dynamic 
can be and was meant to be extended, so as to 
cover the entire ethical field. 

It is clear that if this were accomplished there 
would be left nothing even apparently arbitrary 
in the Christian ordering of life. There would be 
an organic whole. Life would be no longer a set 
of unrelated activities, but would resemble a clus- 
ter of branches from the same stem. All the lines 
of action would be radii starting from a common 
centre: every programme of conduct, through 
whatever fields it might project itself forward, 
would run back for its justification to the same 
fundamental idea, and only as it proved able to 
'do so would be declared correct: the many de- 
partments of activity, with all their differences, 
would be worked according to the same formula, 
and would fall into lines as parts of a harmonious 
whole. There would be no sense of disjointed- 
ness or jerk in passing from one practical question 
to another; no feeling that one is being trans- 
ported into a strange land where the language 



20 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

previously spoken becomes unintelligible, and 
where the coin hitherto current will no longer 
pass. There would remain only different parts 
of one empire, the fundamental law of one being 
the fundamental law of all. Or, to change the 
figure, in the various sections of life's practice 
one would only be working different sums of the 
same order, employing all through the same 
method and rule. Nothing would be left to guess- 
work, nothing to experiment or hypothesis, noth- 
ing to hazardous ventures whereof the end can- 
not be discerned. Between all parts of life there 
would be a real relation. Back in the one ideal 
whereof all the subordinate ideals are but re- 
duced, or particularised, expressions, would be the 
root out of which all the flowers and fruits of ac- 
tion grow. At all times, and under all emergen- 
cies, he who is striving for a right ordering and 
control of his life would have firm ground be- 
neath his feet : no leap in the dark would he ever 
need to take: standing at the one central place, 
he would from there be able to touch the entire 
circumference of things. He would work with 
one tool instead of many. Instead of a number 
of lessons, he would have but a single lesson to 
learn. And not even under the most novel and 
startling questions which the sphinx of experi- 
ence might propound would he be at a loss; for 
he would only have to fall back upon the primary 



THE IDEAL AND THE IDEALS 21 

formula out of which all subsidiary formulae are 
to come, and could then, having discovered the 
word the moment calls for, pass safely on his way. 
With the ideals related to the ideal, discerned as 
specialised adaptations of the ideal, there would 
be unity through all the range of practical life; 
and that sense of coming as an uninstructed 
novice or an unarmed soldier to one ethical prob- 
lem after another, whereby even the Christian 
man is too often beset, would give place to a sense 
that every problem is solved even before it mar- 
shals its perplexities, and conquered even before 
it throws down its gage. He who realises that 
every ethical rule is to be only a version, adapted 
to the occasion, of that highest rule in which the 
supreme spiritual adjustment of his nature is 
prescribed, will have this advantage over others — 
that while they must for each new crisis improvise 
a new programme, he has but to use the one pro- 
gramme, as giving the answer to the question of 
the new hour. For him the practical spheres of 
life are not elements in a disconnected series, but 
parts of an organic whole. 

It may be objected that this is, in effect, the 
extinction of a Christian ethical system as a sepa- 
rate theme of study altogether, and that all 
thought about it becomes in consequence a futile 
thing. If all the practical ideals are given in the 
one spiritual ideal, it is upon that spiritual 



22 THE CHEISTIAN" METHOD OF ETHICS 

ideal alone that >the mind should be con- 
centrated. Why waste time in examining the 
outlying sections of life, when all their secrets 
can be read by reading the secret at the one cen- 
tral place ? 

As a matter of fact, a perfect spiritual adjust- 
ment of man's nature — a perfect ordering of life 
on the religious side — would, were it accom- 
plished, make any study of practical problems un- 
necessary ; and, as will presently be seen, the first 
thing to be said about a right management of 
existence is that on the Christian view there 
should be no necessity to take thought about it 
at all. Since the ideals are given in the ideal, 
an experience perfect in regard to the ideal must 
involve an experience perfect in regard to the 
ideals. The ultimate Christian conception is not 
that a man should know how to bear himself in 
any crisis of experience, and should act out his 
knowledge, but that he should bear himself rightly 
without thinking about it — almost as if he could 
not help it. There should be no need to particu- 
larise : the entire process of self-adjustment among 
practical concerns should be an automatic and 
unconscious thing. But, precisely because the 
spiritual adjustment is not perfectly made, the 
practical problems — which will not wait until the 
spiritual adjustment is consummated, but, press- 
ing as they do, must be dealt with at once — ' ^ 



THE IDEAL AKD THE IDEALS 23 

emerge into the field of thought again. Somehow 
they must be faced and conquered even while the 
soul is passing through all the intermediate spir- 
itual stages towards the perfect thing. And hence 
comes the necessity of making a definite study 
of the ethical applications of the Christian ideal. 
The Christian man wants to put himself, at each 
recurrence of life's questions, into the attitude 
which he would have taken up automatically if 
the perfect spiritual condition had been reached." 
Only, in order to do this it is not enough to fix 
attention upon the perfect spiritual condition it- 
self; for that condition, however clearly appre- 
hended by the intellect, will not work out the 
practical consequences which it would bring about 
if it existed as an actual fact; and the Christian 
man must therefore take up the practical prob- 
lems as they stand — remembering, of course, that 
the necessity of doing so is thrust upon him by the 
imperfection of his spiritual adjustments, and in- 
deed finding in this very fact the way in which 
the problems ought to be solved. He may know 
that a right spiritual adjustment would result in 
an automatic right self-adjustment among all the 
practical difficulties of his days. But in actual 
experience no such automatic sequence is known, 
since its first term is not there. And it becomes 
the Christian man's duty, therefore, to discern 
with the mind what he cannot in its fulness prove 



24 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



in experience, and to ascertain how among life's 
practical spheres the perfect spiritual condition 
would be worked out. In the absence of a com- 
plete spiritual self -adjustment the Christian man 
can at least ask himself, face to face with all the 
various ethical questions of Hfe, " What attitude, j 
in this matter and in this, would the complete./ 
spiritual self-adjustment cause me to take up?*'? 
He must make two questions out of what is really 
one. He must do in intellect what, in a perfect 
ordering of things, would be done in experience 
without the intervention of intellect at all. He 
must make the transition in mind, since experience 
does not make it for itself, from the complete 
spiritual ideal to the ethical question of the mo- 
ment, and must attack the second in the fashion 
which the mind has decided upon as being conso- 
nant with the first. And so we come back to what 
was previously stated as the main requirement in 
a study of Christian practical life. The ideals 
must be viewed as organically related with the 
ideal. 

Ill 

It may fairly be said that Christian ethical sys- 
tems are not usually constructed on these lines. 
The ethical conception is not actually developed 
out of the religious conception, except perhaps in 
the sense of being reached by a process of in- 



THE IDEAL AND THE IDEALS 25 



tellectual inference therefrom — which, of course, 
means only that there is a passage for the mind 
from one to the other, not that the two are really 
one. The moral ideals are not organically con- 
nected with the spiritual ideal: there is no real 
identity (and it is no less than this for which 
we have been contending) between the adjust- 
ment of nature required from the Christian man 
in order to qualify him for the Christian name, 
and the ethical adjustments required of him as he 
deals with the practical problems of life. The 
majority of Christian ethical systems, while they 
may find in the main spiritual movement called 
for by Christianity a reason for the moral move- 
ments and attitudes they prescribe, do not treat 
these latter as being even ideally included in the 
first. They are not based on the idea that if the 
spiritual adjustment be fully and finally made, 
the ethical adjustments are ipso facto completed 
too, and that in so far as an examination of the\ 
ethical adjustments is still necessary it is neces- 
sary only because there is something lacking in 1 
the spiritual adjustment, and because man has/ 
consequently to do with two strokes what ought y 
properly to be accomplished with one. The dual-/ 
ism which (it has been admitted) is temporarily 
inevitable is accepted as if it were not temporary, 
but were permanently inherent in the nature of 
the case. Generally, a system of Christian ethics 



26 THE CHEISTIAi^ METHOD OE ETHICS 

takes this, or something Hke this, for its task — to 
find an answer to the question, What, if Chris- 
tian doctrine be true, and the general principles 
inculcated by Jesus Christ be admitted, must be 
the conduct of a Christian man under the different 
moral problems of ordinary life ? And this, it will 
at once be seen, is to perpetuate that severance, 
against which we have been protesting, between 
the religious and the ethical spheres, even though 
an inquirer is allowed or commanded to carry 
with him, as he enters upon the second field, a 
torch which he has kindled in the first. The 
whole thing becomes merely a matter of finding 
the practical consequences of Christian doctrine 
— which, as previously stated, is an inadequate 
method of regarding the task to be performed. 
The method assumes that, after the religious 
problem has been settled, the attack upon the 
moral problem has to be begun as something new. 
Ordinarily, the large generalisations of Jesus or 
of the New Testament writers are taken and ap- 
plied, so far as they can be, to given practical 
questions; a bridge is built from certain Scrip- 
ture utterances to precepts which (assuming the 
bridge to be soundly constructed) will be reg- 
nant over conduct in its various spheres; and by 
an extensive process of inference from Christian 
truth and from Christian revelation about the 
character of God, and about His relations with 



THE IDEAL AND THE IDEALS 27 

man, the entire field of human activity is supposed 
to be covered at last, and a sufficient rule provided 
for every emergency that may arise. But of 
course the further this process is carried the 
greater becomes the liability to error, — at any 
rate, the greater becomes the consciousness that 
absolute certainty is being left behind. For in 
this matter of inferring a detailed ethical pro- 
gramme, applicable in this instance and in that, 
from a general Christian law, it is not, be it re- 
membered, simply a logical unfolding of terms 
that is being performed. If that were all, no dif- 
ficulty would arise. But what is being done is 
an applying of general and abstract principles to 
concrete situations ; and inasmuch as the concrete 
situations are almost always complex, composed, 
so to say, of subsidiary situations each one of 
which is capable of having a separate general law 
applied to it, the final mental act can hardly be 
called an inference at all. It is rather a balancing 
of diverse, if not opposing, inferences. Indeed, 
amid the complexity of life this process of in- 
ferring a programme of action from general 
Christian principles becomes not so much a pro- 
cess of reasoning as a process of guess. The 
guess may be plausible — may, as a matter of fact, 
come very near the mark. But it is a guess not- 
withstanding. And in a system of ethics so built 
up the final justification will be lacking for the 



28 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



mind; and it will be too much a matter of mere 
probability to give rest. It will be felt that upon 
the winding stairway down which inference has 
tried to find its road there are many loopholes at 
which error may have come in, and that what 
emerges at the bottom may perchance be error 
masquerading in the dress of inference, and not 
genuine inference at all. A system constructed 
in this way is insufficiently guaranteed to be re- 
lied upon with confidence quite unalloyed. 

Moreover, besides that loss of the sense of 
intellectual security, which this method of con- 
structing a body of Christian ethics brings in its 
train, there arises a danger of over-emphasis on 
one special place, of wrong accent, of exaggera- 
tion. Even assuming the method to be essen- 
tially sound, it could only be satisfactorily worked 
if all the general Christian principles were kept 
in view, all the elements of the practical situation 
held separately present to the mind, and, lastly, 
an entirely impartial judgment brought to bear 
upon the final distribution of sovereign power 
between the various laws themselves. But these 
conditions can scarcely ever be fulfilled. As w^as 
said just now, the last act in the process becomes, 
not a simple inference, but a balancing of di- 
verse inferences; and it must be added that a 
quite unbiassed balancing of these is hardly likely 
to take place. Some one general law, some one 



THE IDEAL AND THE IDEALS 29 



aspect of Christian teaching, is hkely to have, 
for the inquirer's mind, an authority or a magnet- 
ism over that of the rest ; and in his formulation 
of the practical programme of life this is bound 
to tell, so that he will apply that particular law 
in season and out of season to the exclusion of 
others, refuse to listen to any qualifying voices, 
and in his zeal for one virtue do injustice to the 
rest. His ethical programme will be apt to be- 
come a monotonous harping on one string. Yet 
it is one of the most important requisites for the 
ordering of life, that we should know where the 
limits of each particular duty lie, as well as the 
line at which each particular duty begins ; where 
one principle yields the sceptre, and another 
comes in to take the throne ; how we may achieve 
a harmonious blending of the virtues rather than 
a shapeless prominence or predominance of one. 
That every general principle is to have its right- 
ful authority, but is not to usurp more than its 
due, is itself one of the primary principles of true 
living. But on the method of Christian ethics 
which simply infers the laws of conduct from 
certain outstanding New Testament utterances 
of a general order, favouritism is sure to creep in 
and destroy the symmetry and proportion which 
ought, in a rightly guided life, to be shown. It 
is perhaps one of the most striking, and at the 
same time one of the most lamentable, conse- 



30 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

quences of constructing moral programmes as 
though they had essentially a separate existence 
from religious programmes, that the part is often 
taken for the whole. 

The purpose of the ensuing studies is to at- 
tempt an ethical construction on the lines pre- 
viously indicated as being likely to lead to a 
satisfactory result. No exhaustive moral pro- 
gramme is aimed at: indeed, some topics ordi- 
narily included in an ethical scheme will probably 
be found wanting, and others not ordinarily so 
included will be found taken up. But some 
effort is to be made in the direction of relating 
the ideals to the ideal. 



II 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 

IT may seem strange that the ultimate Chris- 
tian ideal, in regard to the practical prob- 
lems of life, should be the disappearance of those 
problems altogether, and that Christianity should 
look on those problems as being properly solved, 
not by direct dealing, but by their submersion 
in a larger thing. Yet the fact is so. The first 
thing to be said about the Christian ethical sys- 
tem is that, in its conception of the perfect or- 
dering of life, it views man as not concerned with 
ethical questions at all, but as putting himself into 
such a spiritual adjustment that ethical questions 
settle themselves. It has already been stated that 
the New Testament, when it refers to the differ- 
ent crises of human experience, does so almost 
casually, as if considering that the Christian 
man's right bearing among them may be taken 
for granted. A perfect spiritual adjustment of 
man's nature would, were it accomplished, ren- 
der unnecessary any study of practical questions : 
an experience perfect in regard to the supreme 
spiritual ideal would involve an experience per- 

31 



32 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

feet also in regard to all the practical ideals. 
That this must be the case the next chapter will 
atteirpt to show. For the moment we may be 
content with a simple statement of the fact. And 
it is with an appreciation of this fact that any 
■fruitful study of the Christian conduct of life 
must begin. 

I 

The supreme spiritual adjustment of man's 
nature is performed in conversion ; and to be con- 
verted is to be made out of the same moral ma- 
terial as God Himself, to be made of good. This 
conception of conversion has been elsewhere 
drawn out : ^ our present object is to realise what 
is involved herein on the practical side. Clearly 
there is involved in it an automatic right adjust- 
ment to every circumstance, an instinctive right 
bearing towards every question of duty and every 
temptation to wrong. " Instinctive " is perhaps 
scarcely the best word to employ, inasmuch as 
the automatic right attitude spoken of would re- 
sult, not from the original endowment of man's 
nature, but from the working within him of that 
new nature acquired through the processes of 
spiritual experience from God and Christ. But, 
so long as it be thus guarded, the phrase may 
stand. To be made of good, just as it involves 

1 The Philosophy of Christian Experience, chap. iii. 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 33 



freedom from all struggle within/ involves also 
freedom from all ignorance and perplexity con- 
cerning right relations with that which is without ; 
and we are entitled to repeat that the ultimate 
Christian conception is not that a man should 
know how to hear himself in any crisis of ex- 
perience, and should act out his knowledge, but 
that he should hear himself rightly without think- 
ing ahout it — almost as if he could not help it. 
Just as, speaking after the manner of men, we 
may reverently say of God that He never needs 
to weigh and measure, to balance opposing con- 
siderations, to pause between thought and deed, 
so might one say of him by whom the perfect 
spiritual adjustment has been made, that he will 
under all conditions move straight upon the one 
perfect course, since it will be his nature so to 
do, and he cannot, consistently with the perfect 
spiritual adjustment he has gone through, do 
aught else. And the Christian ethical ideal lies 
in that automatic self-direction among all the 
practical matters of experience which would nec- 
essarily be performed by a nature made of good. 

Christianity, in brief, sinks the conception of 
morality in that of sainthood. In the experience 
to which it looks forward as the highest there is 
little place for a mere resolve to do what is right 
and to avoid what is wrong; the Christian man 
^ The Philosophy of Christian Experience, pp. 59-61. 



34 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OE ETHICS 

is not supposed to be drawing up schemes of 
virtuous living, ranking the various graces in 
their due order and apportioning to each one its 
rightful measure of care and zeal; he is looked 
upon, rather, as possessed by such high tides of 
spiritual passion, resulting from the inner condi- 
tion to which he has attained, that the outward 
activities drop naturally into proper movement 
and shape. Christianity would have a man reach 
a stage of spiritual development at which it be- 
comes unnecessary for him to concern himself 
with the character of the things he is going to 
do. The ethical requirement made by the Chris- 
tian ideal goes far beyond a cold and common- 
place morality, far beyond a mere assertion that 
the feet are not to slip aside from the path of 
virtue, nor the hands to give themselves to doing 
the tasks of sin. It asks for a permanent and 
passionate righteousness within, wherefrom a 
consistent righteousness without cannot choose 
but flow : it asks for such an established inner 
condition that all questions of conduct shall, by 
anticipation, be answered before they arise: it 
asks, so to say, that the potentiality of faultless 
action shall be ever present, guaranteed by the 
quality of the soul, and ready to be drawn upon 
whenever any crisis of circumstance presents its 
demand ; and it declares that all the external pro- 
cesses of life are to be governed, not directly, but 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 35 

by the running of irresistible impulses out from 
the enduring state of the soul. A perfect ethical 
ordering of life is to be attained, according to the 
Christian ideal, without any fresh interposition 
of the will between the appearance of an ethical 
problem and its solution by him to whom it is ad- 
dressed. To put it another way, the soul is al- 
ways to have ready within itself, whether for the 
moment there may be or may not be some tempta- 
tion or some question that calls it out to the open 
battlefield, such reserves as will make the result 
of any suddenly arising conflict a foregone con- 
clusion. The Christian man's faculty of in- 
stinctive recoil from the evil or inferior course, 
and of adherence to the true course, is to be as 
much a part of himself as his faculty of sight 
or taste or touch ; and the spirit of perfect readi- 
ness to move out upon the one right path is to 
be always alert behind the curtain which veils 
the secret of his personality from all save himself 
and God. The highest Christian ethical concep- 
tion knows nothing of a constant choice, made 
with effort and perplexity, between alternative 
courses, nothing of a constant struggle in which 
the solicitation of baser methods is with difficulty 
resisted and the call of worthier methods half- 
reluctantly heard; and it knows nothing of a 
merely intermittent virtue which asserts itself at 
a moral crisis and then goes to sleep again till 



36 THE CHEISTIAJs" METHOD OF ETHICS 

the warning trumpet of the sentinel conscience 
rouses it once more ; but it declares for such an 
abiding condition of the inner nature as shall 
automatically secure the rectitude of the external 
programmes, and make the practice of virtue 
an entirely natural function, needing, at any given 
moment, no fresh gathering together of the forces 
of mind and will. That is the ultimate Christian 
ideal. 

A reference to ordinary experience, on its prac- 
tical side, makes clearer, if only by force of con- 
trast, how great and far-reaching the ideal really 
is. For from the majority of men (whether or 
no the experience of even the greatest saints has 
ever reached the required level need not be dis- 
cussed) this constant potentiality of a perfect 
ethical performance is too sadly absent; and it is 
not with a permanent bent away from all things 
evil and towards all things good that their char- 
acters are shaped. For the most of us our right 
doing, even when we do the right, is not the out- 
come of an enduring condition, the revelation 
of an embedded quality within. It is an affair 
of the moment, — in many cases almost an acci- 
dent, one might say. At any rate, there were 
practically equal chances the other way. If the 
ideal be that we should have no need to concern 
ourselves directly with the practical ordering of 
life, since a right practical ordering of life ought 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 37 



to be automatically attained, then the language 
of the ideal is for the majority a foreign tongue. 
We drop into goodness occasionally. We pick up 
some of the opportunities of good that we happen 
to come across — and do not always do even that 
without reluctance. It may be granted that we 
have no passion for evil ; but neither have we any 
abiding native passion for the best. Our natures, 
in regard to these things, are so largely neutral, 
colourless, indeterminate: we are midway be- 
tween the passionate sinners and the passionate 
saints ; and in regard to the established condition 
of our souls, abhorrence of evil is too strong a 
phrase, cleaving to good too superlative an idea, 
to describe what we are. At the best, our worthy 
activities, as each one goes forth from us, are the 
result of calculations freshly made. They were 
not inevitable. Other possibilities were not ruled 
out. And it must be understood that the ultimate 
Christian ethical ideal contemplates something 
more than that we shall come out unharmed and 
undisgraced from each crisis of our moral life, 
vanquishing every temptation by a sudden gird- 
ing up of our strength, obeying every command 
by making a new call upon our powers — that it 
contemplates the existence in us of an abiding 
condition of good, out of which the practice of 
good must instinctively and inevitably come. Ac- 
cording to the loftiest Christian ethical concep- 



38 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

tion, the moralist is lost in, and rendered super- 
fluous by, the saint. 

II 

It must not be supposed, however, that in thus 
removing the main emphasis of thought from 
questions of conduct, the Christian ideal ceases 
to care for them. ^ That there have been mis- 
understandings of the Christian ideal in this 
direction has to be admitted; and the fact that 
insistence falls upon inward potentialities rather 
than upon the outward manifestation of them has 
sometimes been taken (though quite inconse- 
quently and without warrant) as if it implied 
heedlessness concerning practice. In the actual 
history of religious experience, at any rate, things 
have sometimes worked out that way, even 
though there has been no definite formulation 
of a doctrine to that effect. Yet a right under- 
standing of the Christian ideal should surely be 
an ample guard against any danger of laxity in 
the external programmes of life. It is quite true, 
as has been said, that Christianity looks upon 
ethical questions as being properly solved, not 
directly, but by their submersion in a larger thing ; 
but it does this only in order that the final issue 
in regard to those ethical questions may be raised 
to a higher level than any direct dealing could 
attain. Of course, if the significance of what 
1 See also Chap. V. Sec. 3. 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 39 

has been previously set down be apprehended, 
it will be obvious that this is so. What is de- 
manded is that automatic self-direction among all 
the matters of practical experience which would 
necessarily be performed by a nature made of 
good. And this implies that practice is to be 
of the loftiest possible order, since out of a 
perfected nature only a perfect practice can 
come. 

It is worth while to insist on the point, since 
in giving itself to those distinctly spiritual pro- 
cesses by which the inward perfecting is to be 
attained, human nature, with its limited powers 
of application and its readiness to shut its eyes, 
is apt to let other things slide. The inward per- 
fecting once attained, of course the danger would 
be passed ; but the mere eifort to attain the inward 
perfecting may lead to laxity in that department 
of life which, were inward perfecting reached, 
would settle itself on right lines. The intel- 
lectual acceptance of the truth that the Christian 
ethical ideal demands a right external ordering, 
automatically issuing from a right inward con- 
dition, may result in that very imperfection of 
practice which the Christian ideal forbids. And 
indeed, one remembers how Christ Himself was 
careful to insist on the fact that His demands 
were, not less, but more, searching than any de- 
mands that had been made before. Face 
to face with the systems of His day, and sub- 



40 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

stituting His own system for them, He realised, 
evidently, that the principles which He was de- 
claring were so entirely different from what 
was currently considered to be righteousness that 
they might easily be misunderstood — or at least 
that in actual life their far-reaching implications 
might be forgotten. The Pharisees, for instance, 
might sneer because the code of laws on which 
they laid such stress found no place in Christ's 
scheme of things, and might say that He let His 
disciples off lightly. He shows, therefore, how 
deep-reaching His requirements are. There is 
something like a touch of sarcasm in it too. 

Think not that I came to destroy the law or the 
prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.'' 
Not to destroy — that was really what the Phar- 
isees were doing with the law and the prophets, 
in spite of their loud professions of loyalty to 
them. But to fulfil — the Pharisees, who had in 
a manner fulfilled them, filled them with all sorts 
of things they could not hold, had not fulfilled 
them in truth after all. That work was left for 
Christ to do. He was to " fulfil " all the morali- 
ties of law and prophets by His method of draw- 
ing the attention away from them ; and the latter 
thing was only done with the first in view. And 
again, " Except your righteousness shall exceed 
the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, 
ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 41 



of heaven." Exceed the righteousness of the 
scribes and Pharisees — although the scribes and 
Pharisees already had some prescription of 
righteousness for almost every moment of the 
day ! Christ was not going to have it supposed, 
either by the Pharisees or by any who might 
join His band, that the new preaching meant a 
lowering of the standard of life. It meant pre- 
cisely the opposite of that. He took one sin 
after another which they of old time had con- 
demned, and His clear "But I say unto you " 
rang out to condemn, not only the sin, but the 
thought of it, the spirit of it, whether or no the 
sin itself were actually done ; and the implication 
was that in His greater and deeper demand the 
smaller and shallower demand was of necessity 
wrapped up. He took the emphasis away from 
external action, not to make moral distinctions 
unimportant, but to invest them with a deeper 
importance than they had ever possessed. Al- 
though He was not giving out a detailed pro- 
gramme of conduct such as the scribes and Phar- 
isees were always ready with. He was imposing 
a larger requirement than they — a requirement 
wherein theirs, so far as it was concerned with 
a really ethical management of the outward life, 
was included as a matter of course. And the 
modern student of the Christian ideal needs to 
remind himself that the Christian ideal removes 



42 THE CHEISTIAIT METHOD OF ETHICS 

the emphasis of thought from the outward pro- 
grammes of life, not because it has no care for 
them, but because in the greater achievement for 
which it asks they cannot but be truly worked out. 

That ordinary experience had not always 
realised this has been already confessed. And 
it is not difficult to find some reason for the fact. 
Conduct is a tangible thing: it is, as it were, 
something one can see and weigh and measure: 
one knows where it begins and where it ends ; and 
so long as it is definite actions one has to deal 
with, one knows exactly where one stands. A 
method of life which prescribes a programme of 
outward duties — one may be able or unable to 
fulfil the programme, but one will at any rate 
understand what is wanted. But in the realm of 
motive and spirit and character it is easy to get 
bewildered: an air of vagueness hangs round it 
all ; and once it is said that the Christian method 
calls men to take their eyes away from conduct, 
because conduct is, after all, not the principal 
thing, bewilderment is apt to come back upon 
the external life, and thus in the realm of prac- 
tice moral bearings are swiftly lost. Were we 
commanded to do this or that — well, it would be 
straight and plain. Told that it is not primarily 
with the issuing of such commands that the Chris- 
tian method of life is concerned, we come, albeit 
unconsciously, to draw wrong inferences. We 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 43 



understand that arduous toil after correctness of 
conduct no longer counts as chief; and we read 
it as if it were the correctness of conduct rather 
than the arduous toil after it that has ceased to 
count. If this be a fine distinction, it is at any 
rate one which those who would live by the Chris- 
tian ideal must strive to understand. If the 
imperativeness of law be abolished in one sense 
according to the Christian scheme, it is its im^ 
mediate, its direct, imperativeness alone. That 
imperativeness acts still, though the perfected 
inner condition which the Christian ideal de- 
mands should cease to be conscious of its pressure 
and its curb. With all its insistence on an auto- 
matic right ordering of life's practice as the high- 
est thing, the Christian ideal nevertheless has to 
say in regard to the law, that it came not to 
destroy but to fulfil. 

It is — let it be repeated — because, even for the 
best, the realisation of the Christian ideal is only 
partial, that all this has to be said. With the ideal 
completely realised there would be no further 
need to emphasise the fact that, even in drawing 
the thought away from conduct, the Christian 
ideal recognises how important conduct is; for, 
as was said, out of a perfected nature only a 
perfected practice could come. The thing would 
prove itself simply by taking place. But in the 
transition phase of his spiritual experience man 



44 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

may fix his thought upon the reHgious processes 
he is called upon to go through, and forget that 
he must also keep in mind what, if those pro- 
cesses were carried through to their final issue, 
would adjust -itself. Hence comes the need for 
a reminder that emphasis on that which is within 
implies no carelessness as to that which is with- 
out. We shall see at a later stage how a compre- 
hension of the ultimate ideal is to guide man's 
efforts after a right self-adjustment to practical 
problems as they arise. For the moment the truth 
must be emphasised that, according to the Chris- 
tian ideal, conduct is exalted to as high a place as 
any scheme of morality could give it. It is not 
exalted conduct, but the methods by which man 
must temporarily lift himself to the plane of 
exalted conduct, that the Christian ideal sweeps 
away. 

Ill 

According to the loftiest Christian conception, 
then, a perfected morality is by no means the 
greatest thing: the loftiest Christian conception 
looks on the moralist as lost in the saint, and 
calls for an abiding inner condition by which the 
rectitude of external programmes shall be auto- 
matically secured. The ideal is admittedly high 
— with something even of severity and sternness 
in the uncompromising requirements of it, one 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 45 

might at first be inclined to declare. Yet it is 
worth noting in this connection, that to make 
such a stringent demand as all this implies is 
quite in line with the Christian doctrine of the 
Fatherhood of God; and, with a little considera- 
tion, one reaches the seeming paradox that the 
very absoluteness of the requirement takes away 
its aspect of severity, and invests the God who 
makes it with the office, not alone of Ruler and 
Judge, but of Father too. Were God satisfied 
with man's attainment when no apparent tangible 
transgression rises up to offend His eye, were He 
content with a mere external conformity to an 
imposed law, then He would be Ruler indeed, 
but Ruler only, and the deeper relationship of 
Fatherhood would find no place. But because 
God's demands upon us reach further than that 
which is visible and outward, because He asks 
for much more than an external ethical perfec- 
tion. He reveals Himself as connected (at any 
rate as wanting to be connected) in His own 
inmost character with ours, and stands forth as 
Father of our spirits, not only as Lord and King. 
For between master and servant, between king 
and subject, there is no question of inward con- 
dition at all: so long as the visible courses of 
servant or subject lead to no controversy and are 
approved as correct, the requirements of the 
relation are fulfilled; it is only within the limits 



46 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

of your own family circle that you can hold any 
inquisition into the secrets of character, only in 
those bound to you by closer ties than those of 
mere service that you can demand or expect a 
spirit congenial to your own. And thus, just 
because God, according to the Christian view, 
asks for this saintliness wherein all outward pro- 
grammes are transcended, He declares us to be 
to Him in the relation of children in His family 
— declares, at any rate, that this relation is 
potentially ^ ours. The very depth and greatness 
of what He requires shows that He is more than 
\ a King seeking to exercise a despotic sway ; for 
a Father, recognising that our spirits are come 
out from His, and beholding in us capabilities of 
character that mark out our natures as the off- 
spring of His own — a Father, and a Father 
alone, could say, " It is in the inward parts that 
Tightness must be established." The very fact 
that the ultimate Christian ideal is so searching 
proves that the God who sets the ideal on high 
counts Himself as being in, or as ready to enter, 
the closest relationship with man. The very ideal 
in which the greatness of the Christian demand 

'^Potentially, because the Fatherhood of God, while in a 
manner and in degree a reality for all men, does not come 
fully into play till man's right spiritual adjustment has been 
made. See chap. iv. in The Philosophy of Christian Expe- 
rience. 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 47 

is embodied becomes also the revelation which 
announces the Christian conception of the grace 
of God. 

IV 

Over against the admitted stringency of the 
ultimate Christian ideal must be set the fact that 
it really means, in the truest sense, the emancipa- 
tion of man. In accepting that ideal for the goal 
of his moral and spiritual striving, man moves 
toward no narrow prison-door, but rather toward 
a " large place." And, inasmuch as attempts are 
not seldom made, by a mere manipulation of 
moral laws, by giving to them all possible elas- 
ticity, by reducing their pressure to a minimum, 
to secure for man that liberty whereto he feels 
he has a native right, it is worth while insisting 
on the truth that Christianity in its lofty ideal of 
an automatic right practice, proceeding out of an 
abiding condition within, has found a more ex- 
cellent way. Inasmuch, also, as from even the 
Christian point of view the true conception of 
liberty is not always grasped, there is further 
reason for laying stress upon it and making it 
clear. The greatness of the ultimate Christian 
ideal implies, as has just been said, the Father- 
hood, actual or potential, of God. It implies also 
the true freedom of man. 

The reconciliation of human initiative, human 



48 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

freedom, the rights of personality with law, pro- 1 
ceeds usually by the method of attenuating the 

demands of law to the furthest possible point ! 
consistent with the safety of society as a whole. 

The assumption is that adherence to direction ' 

and law is necessarily inconsistent with the pos- j 

session of true liberty and with the consciousness j 
of being free. Yet the reconciliation of liberty 

and law is possible by a quite different method; | 

and Christianity, in its ultimate ethical ideal, j 

makes the reconciliation between the two in its | 

own way, saving the honour and the sovereignty ; 

of both. The assumption of inconsistency be- | 

tween adherence to law and the possession of ] 

freedom is fundamentally false. Freedom may | 

be ours by reason of the absence of law, it is true, ^ 
although anarchy rather than freedom is the 
word which better describes the condition of 

things resulting therefrom; but freedom may be i 

ours too through harmony with law, through en- j 

tire agreement between the inward movement of j 

our natures and the prescriptions of law outside ; ,j 

and it is freedom such as this that alone deserves j 

the name. The consciousness of liberty is ours, i 

not when laws are silent, but when desire in us j 

speaks with the same voice as that in which the j 
commands of law are proclaimed. One does not 
need to look far for an instance. We know it 
for a binding law of the social state that no man 

1 

\ 



j 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 49 

shall steal another man's goods, — but does that 
law interfere with our sense of freedom? Not 
if we be honest men and women. Some members 
of the community there are who by reason of that 
law feel their liberty curtailed, because to steal 
another man's goods is precisely the thing they 
want to do; but the majority find no grievance 
in such an enactment, do not take it as any re- 
striction or restraint. We are free, notwith- 
standing that we are not permitted to be thieves ; 
and we are free because our desire and the law's 
command are at one. Freedom, in fact, lies not 
in the absence of law, but in our harmony with 
law. When law, command, direction, do not 
quarrel with what we are— when the movement 
of our nature is not in the opposite direction 
from the movement of law, so that discomfort and 
chafing and conflict result from the collision of 
the two, but in the same direction as that of law, 
so that in harmonious company the two work 
themselves out — ^then is our sense of freedom 
wholly unimpaired, let law be far-reaching and 
inexorable as it may. For through harmony with 
law the very consciousness of law disappears : it 
is Yiot until we begin to kick against the pricks 
that we realise the sharpness of the goad ; and if 
we have no desire to enter upon this or that for- 
bidden way, we do not see the sign put up to 
warn us off. By our harmony with the law our 



50 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



freedom from the law is secured. Life works 
itself out unfettered if only its impulses be pure. 
Authority, then, has not to dictate or to forbid 
what life shall be or shall not be: it does but 
confirm what life is. 

It is precisely this condition that is called for 
by the Christian ethical ideal ; and it is precisely 
this condition, let it be added, that the Christian 
religion sets itself to bring about for man. Its 
aim is to set man free from the yoke of bondage. 
And it views all lower moralities as insufficient, 
not only because in fulfilling them (even if he 
fulfils them perfectly) man fails to discharge his 
obligations and to rise to the level he ought to 
reach, but because they fail to bestow on man the 
freedom to which he has a right. All systems of 
morality — however far they may be Christianised 
in their programmes, and however far they may 
depend for their effectiveness on Christian ideas, 
makes no difference — leave those who adopt them 
without the privilege they ought to enjoy. Chris- 
tianity, for that matter, is at one with the most 
modern voices calling for liberty in declaring 
that freedom is the supreme prize, even though 
Christianity's method of attaining freedom be 
different from that which the insistent voices of 
the time recommend ; and no understanding of 
Christianity is complete if it does not realise how 
in the Christian ideal the truest freedom is in- 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 51 

volved. Yet even from the Christian point of 
view this is not always understood, as was stated 
just now. There are so many ideas and so many 
modes of expression current in Christian circles 
by which the essential conception of Christian 
liberty (in the sense indicated) is obscured. Men 
are pointed to certain lines of action which it is 
alleged ought, if they be Christian disciples, to 
become theirs ; and they are urged to take a hold 
upon themselves and force their activities along 
those lines. But even if they succeeded in doing 
that to the highest pitch of perfection, no forcing 
of themselves into any line of action could be 
anything else than bondage. To drill ourselves 
into obedience to words of command, even though 
they be Christ's, is not to be set free. The 
thoughts and phrases which circle about the con- 
ception of imitating Christ are also responsible 
for obscuring the view of liberty as it is contained 
in the Christian ethical ideal. Men aim at a sort 
of unerring mechanical skill which shall enable 
them to make each line of life's writing an exact 
reproduction of the line set at the top of the 
page by Christ's own hand. This may be the 
best bondage in all the world, but it is bondage 
still. It is possible to speak so much about imitat- 
ing Christ, and about following in Christ's steps, 
and about making our outward doing conform to 
Christ's own, that the whole conception of Chris- 



52 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

tian ethics grows artificial, and the experience 
of liberty passes entirely out of range. In such 
self-compulsion freedom, deliverance, is not 
known. To live by this method is still to wear 
the yoke. It is quite true that a man may have 
to begin with this ; but if it be at that he stops, 
and with that he ends, he does not know the free- 
dom wherewith Christianity would make him 
free. For it is from the contradiction between 
impulses within and law without that the Chris- 
tian method, carried to its utmost height, is to 
emancipate the Christian man ; and in its ideal of 
an automatically-wrought right programme, pro- 
ceeding out of a rightly adjusted nature, Christi- 
anity provides for the best freedom that human 
life can know. In the realisation of that ideal 
the soul attains the elasticity, the sense of bound- 
ing joy, which it is apt to seek mistakenly by a 
mere loosening of the bonds of law when it seeks 
it at all, or which, under inadequate interpreta- 
tions of the Christian system, it is so apt to lose. 
It is actually in the interests of liberty and large- 
ness of life that the full scope of the Christian 
ethical ideal needs to be grasped. In the hour of 
attaining that ideal the consciousness of being 
pressed and oppressed by law is gone, and the 
soul, because it has no more contention with the 
good that binds it, is most truly free. 



THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 53 



V 

The ultimate ethical ideal, therefore, from the 
Christian point of view, is this — an automatic 
right adjustment to every circumstance, an in- 
stinctive right bearing toward every question of 
duty and every temptation to wrong. He who 
attains to the ideal will under all conditions move 
straight upon the one perfect course, since it will 
be his nature so to do. 



Ill 



THE RELIGIOUS PROGRAMME AND 
THE ULTIMATE ETHICAL IDEAL 

IT may be asked, however, whether the pro- 
gramme which rehgion prescribes to man 
really makes for the attainment of a practice 
right through all its range. " You may advance 
as a theory that such a practice is the thing which 
Christianity holds desirable," it may be said, 
" but when we enter the distinctively religious 
realm, and concern ourselves with distinctively 
religious terms, are we really set upon the road 
toward this ethical ideal? Salvation and faith, 
and all the other terms which Christianity is al- 
ways using — what have they to do with, and how 
do they further, a perfection of life on its prac- 
tical side? How are you going to run any vital 
and organic line of connection from these re- 
ligious terms, and from the processes they denote, 
to a perfect practice issuing from a perfect in- 
ward condition? It is all very well to say that 
Christianity demands a perfect practice — but does 
its primary religious programme have any natural 
bearing on the matter of practice at all? " 

54 



THE RELIGIOUS PEOGRAMME 55 

Certainly the question must be faced, if we are 
to accomplish what at the outset was declared to 
be a necessary thing, and are to relate the ideals 
to the ideal. It must be made clear that in con- 
cerning himself with religion, in taking up the 
attitude and going through the discipline of soul 
which Christianity ordains, a man is really doing 
more than this, and is really providing for an out- 
ward activity that shall be perfect down to its 
minutest detail. Religion, in brief, must be seen 
not only as demanding an automatic right prac- 
tice, but as creating it. 

And if the religious programme be rightly con- 
ceived, it is at once seen that this is precisely 
what religion does. It is quite true that the 
Christian programme is sometimes so formulated 
— faith and salvation, and all the other standard 
terms of the religious life, are sometimes so in- 
terpreted — as to keep religion out of all relation 
with practice, and to make it possible to pro- 
gress in the religious life without coming any 
nearer to ethical completeness. A view of re- 
ligion, for example, that is merely forensic — a 
view of religion, in other words, which simply 
takes it as enabling a man to stand in a position 
toward God legally blameless and clear — leaves 
the matter of practice untouched. Similarly a 
view of religion that is merely mystical — a view 
of religion which takes it as essentially consisting 



56 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

in an emotional self-abandonment to the presence 
and influence of God (whether that presence and 
influence be considered as acting from within or 
from without, and however that presence and in- 
fluence may, according to the particular theory, 
be mediated, makes no difference) does not pro- 
vide, except perhaps in some very indirect fashion, 
for an elevation of life's activity to the perfect 
level. But, with the religious programme rightly 
read, we perceive at once that to give ourselves 
to the Christian religious programme is to secure 
that automatic ethical perfection which, as has 
been stated, Christianity demands. 

The programme of the Christian religion has 
been dealt with, and the interpretation of the 
standard Christian terms has been given, else- 
where. ^ In brief summary, the programme runs 
thus — that man attains the spiritually ideal life 
by possessing within himself no thought, no feel- 
ing, no living impulse which is not born moment 
by moment straight from God, God thus exercis- 
ing a real spiritual parentage, a veritable Father- 
hood toward man, and man thus possessing the 
actual life of God within himself — that, since man 
cannot come near enough to God for the estab- 
lishment of a relationship so intimate as this, 
and being unable, consequently, to ensure that 

1 The Philosophy of Christian Experience, chaps, iv., vi., 
vii. 



i 



THE EELIGIOUS PEOGEAMME 57 

God's actual life shall at every moment be re- 
produced within him, God has in Jesus Christ 
sent His own life (not a mere revelation of what 

it is, nor a mere message about it) down to the | 

human level, Christ becoming thus literally the j 

Life-giver to man, having life in Himself as the j 

Father has life in Himself — that man must so J 

relate himself with the ever-present Christ as to | 

obtain this God-life which Christ holds — and that l 

faith, whereby this is done, is the actual move- | 

ment of man's whole personality (not a mere j 

mystical contemplation) to identify itself with, ' 

and to lose itself in the personality of Christ. ! 
And it has been stated, also, ^ that, inasmuch as 
this is the ideal spiritual condition, not perfectly 
realised in any one, and inasmuch as man does 

not perform that one unbroken act of faith, co- ! 

extensive with his entire earthly term, which ' 

would make all other religious exercises super- j 
fluous by establishing a permanent oneness be- j i 
tween Christ's life and his own, man must keep I ; 

[ up a process of spiritual self-culture, inviting and ' 




The Philosophy of Christian Experience, chap. viiL 



58 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

that shall be automatically right and true. In 
what the programme prescribes, both in regard 
to man's dealing with God and in regard to man's 
dealing with himself, it works straight toward 
the ultimate Christian ethical ideal. 

I 

If we regard the religious programme so far 
as it deals with man's ideal relationship with God, 
it becomes evident that the religious programme 
provides for an automatically right ordering of 
life on its practical side. For the programme, as 
just summarised, does not offer either a purely 
forensic or a purely mystical view of religion, 
and does not, therefore, stand disconnected from 
life's practical concerns, as does any religion to 
which either of these terms could justly be ap- 
plied. That the view of religion offered in the 
Christian programme (if the brief summary of 
it given above be correct) is not merely forensic, 
it is hardly necessary to prove; for in that it 
speaks of the actual possession of God's own life 
by man, of a veritable spiritual parentage exer- 
cised moment by moment from God to man, of a 
line of spiritual heredity running ceaselessly be- 
tween the two, it amply clears itself from any 
suspicion of looking upon the religious life as 
consisting simply in the acquisition by man of a 
legally blameless position and standing in God's 



THE EELIGIOUS PEOGEAMME 59 



sight. And it may at least be said — though much 
more remains ia be said afterwards by way of 
positive affirmation — that the processes and ex- 
periences suggested by this language imply 
changes in man's inward condition by which out- 
ward conduct cannot fail to be in great measure 
turned upon worthy lines. Certainly the Chris- 
tian programme cannot be said to be out of rela- 
tion to life's practical concerns by reason of any 
legal fictions (such as may lurk, for instance, in 
certain mistaken interpretations of the doctrine 
of justification by faith) concerning the relations 
between God and man; and it is impossible to 
charge against it, on the ground of any " foren- 
sic " dealing with those relations, that a man 
may have religious experiences without being 
affected in the practical conduct of life. To be in 
union with God, in any real sense, must make a 
difference to man's ethical conceptions, and to the 
way in which he embodies them in word and deed. 

It is, perhaps, not so immediately evident that 
the Christian programme of the religious life es- 
capes the danger of falling into mysticism, and, 
as a consequence, dropping out of relation with 
practical concerns. Yet a little thought suffices to 
establish the fact. It is, as has been said, upon an 
actual sharing of the life of God Himself, upon 
the production of a real spiritual heredity run- 
ning at every moment from God to man, that the 



60 THE CHEISTIAJ^ METHOD OF ETHICS 

Christian programme concentrates; and it is by 
the identification of man's personahty, through 
faith, with the life of God as brought near in 
the personahty of Jesus Christ that this com- 
munion of Hfe is brought about. It is true that 
surrender to God, rather than striving or know- 
ing, comes thus to be the watchword of the saintly 
life. But whether or no this surrender, this con- 
centration of one personality upon another, will 
have results which show themselves in the prac- 
tical sphere, necessarily depends upon the person- 
ality to which man gives up his own. If that per- 
sonality be itself ceaselessly working, ceaselessly 
seeking to realise itself and its purposes through 
every detail of the history of the world and of 
human life, then man's abandonment to that 
personality must mean, not that man's activities 
remain unaffected, but that they are heightened 
and intensified and turned upon the line of per- 
fectness. In the idea of a higher personality 
seizing upon and dominating a lower is involved 
the idea of the higher personality's activity seiz- 
ing upon and dominating the activity of the 
lower. And, since it is a ceaselessly working and 
active God whereof Christianity speaks, sur- 
render to that God must imply that all the work 
and activity of surrendered man are made and 
held right and true. Surrender to a perfect and 
active God must bring with it a perfecting of 



THE EELIGIOUS PEOGEAMME 61 

man's practical programmes down to their minut- 
est detail. Doubtless mysticism, as it has existed 
in the Christian Church, has frequently forgotten 
this ; but the critics of mysticism have frequently 
forgotten it too. As man reaches the point of 
taking life from God instead of making his own, 
he takes the activities of God in substitution for 
activities of his own ; and a real surrender to the 
divine life leads inevitably to a perfected morality 
and to an ethical programme which harmonises 
with and forms part of that eternal working car- 
ried on from the beginning by the energies of 
God. 

Indeed, in its insistence on surrender, in its 
emphasising of the self-abandonment of man to 
God as the all-inclusive religious programme, in 
its usage of what might be called mystical speech, 
Christianity always assumes — always keeps, as 
it were, in the back of its mind — the idea of God 
as active, and thus guards itself against the risk 
of making a mere passive contemplation of the 
divine perfections the beginning and end of the 
Christian life. It sums up the necessary rela- 
tionships which man must assume towards God 
as " knowing God," as " seeing Him as He is," 
as " loving Him " rather than as knowing Him 
in the purely intellectual sense, as having towards 
Him the receptive mind and heart of " a little 
child." In these and other ways it describes that 



62 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

movement of the human personaHty up to and 
into the divine personaHty by which a right re- 
lation between man and God is set up. But it is 
always the whole man moving out upon the whole 
God, the whole God moving down upon the 
whole man, that it contemplates — the activity of 
God thus supplanting the activity of man, as well 
as a God-ward emotionalism being kindled in 
man's heart and responded to from God's. In 
fact, in the New Testament saying, " We know 
that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like 
him; for we shall see him even as he is," the 
secret of a perfect ethics, notwithstanding the 
ring of mysticism in the words, is given. The 
experience of our common life gives some illus- 
tration of the principle involved. In our com- 
panionships, we always tend to grow in character 
like to those on whom the inward vision broods, 
and, through our growing likeness of character 
to them, to assimilate our practice — almost un- 
consciously — to theirs. So soon as we are able 
to get to a contemplation of our friend's char- 
acter, as distinguished from the mere outside and 
accidental circumstances which surround him — 
when, in other words, we see him as he is — the 
qualities of character in him begin to take a hold 
upon us and to reproduce themselves — inevitably 
reproducing, also, their practical consequences — 
in us : we cannot abandon ourselves to a real, con- 



THE EELIGIOUS PEOGEAMME 63 

tinued, undisturbed " seeing " of another without, 
in measure proportioned to the intensity of 
our " seeing," having our nature and conduct 
conformed to his. Of course, one comes now 
and again upon instances of a mere mechanical 
imitation of one person by a second: some trick 
of manner, some habit of action, catches the im- 
itator's fancy, and he adopts it as his own. It 
is not with this that we are concerned; for that 
mechanical imitation implies no real " vision " 
of character at all — though it might be remarked, 
in passing, that it fairly corresponds to a patch- 
ing and alteration of outward conduct in order 
to bring it into correspondence with a divine pat- 
tern, without that previous " vision of the 
divine personality out of which the perfect out- 
ward conduct should come. But the companion- 
ships which mould us, the friendships which 
really bring a change upon the moral make of us 
and upon the consequent practical ordering of our 
life, are those in which we permit the character 
of companion or friend to reveal itself to us, and 
in which, simply surrendering ourselves with 
calmness to that character's spell, we do nothing 
but " see." Because he to whom we thus submit 
ourselves is an active and working being, with 
impulses ceaselessly pressing out into practice, 
surrender means for us something more than an 
emotional impression — means a heightening or 



64 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

lowering of conduct to the level on which our 
friend maintains his own. 

It is a similar process, but intensified by many 
degrees, that Christianity contemplates when it 
sets " seeing " God, abandonment to God, surren- 
der of human life to God's life, in the forefront 
of its programme as the essential thing. It con- 
templates man as so stretching himself up and out 
toward God that God, returning upon man in all 
the qualities of His own life and character, shall 
make man's life — in its activities, necessarily, as 
well as in all else — only an adjunct of His own. 
A similar process, it has been said, but a similar 
process intensified by many degrees. For a really 
complete abandonment to the " seeing " of what 
another is, is never attained in human experience 
— a fact for which we may perhaps be thankful, 
since an exact reproduction of any character in 
this world would not mean the winning of per- 
fection. Our vision of others is never more than 
partial; and our imitation of others, in tempera- 
ment and activity, is therefore never more than 
partial either. But in our relationships with God, 
that entire abandonment to the seeing of what 
He is comes to be the one thing we need, since 
(He being what He is) the perfect vision of God, 
which would be the perfect transforming powder 
for man, would make us, in character and con- 
duct, to be complete. Holiness, seen as it is in 



THE RELIGIOUS PROGRAMME 65 



God, could not fail to get an absolute hold upon 
us ; and, since holiness in God is active and work- 
ing, our practical programmes would, under the 
influence of the " vision," be no longer ours, but 
God's, and consequent holy as God's own. The 
constant seeing of Him must draw from Him 
into us what His own perfectness holds — the per- 
fection of His activity, among all other things. 
And when it is suggested that the Christian pro- 
gramme makes for a mysticism which has little or 
no relation to practical concerns, the reply is 
clear. It is a ceaselessly working and active God 
of whom Christianity speaks ; and, in all its speech 
of most mystical ring, it contemplates the whole 
man moving out upon the whole God, and the 
whole God moving down upon the whole man. 

One may claim, indeed, that those terms of the 
Christian programme which are possessed of mys- 
tical suggestion need to be, not put aside, but 
pressed home in their, full significance, if one is to 
see how the Christian programme makes for 
ethical completeness. It may appear a strange 
thing to say ; but the failure of mysticism, in so far 
as it has failed, has Iain in the fact that it has not 
been mystical enough; and its critics, instead of 
assailing its principle, should have bidden it apply 
its own principle with greater stringency and 
force. The error of mysticism has been that it 
has taken surrender, contemplation, the " vision," 



66 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

too exclusively as an alternative to intellectual 
processes, as a method of knowledge to be substi- 
tuted for the ordinary methods of mind and brain. 
And against a mysticism which so limits its own 
ideal and its own hope it may be plausibly con- 
tended that its bearing upon practice is only re- 
mote. But all the mystical terms of the Chris- 
tian programme need to be pressed till they yield 
the conception of the whole man uniting with the 
whole God; and in such a union as that, having 
given up the intellect as the chief factor in the 
construction of his moral and spiritual religious 
life, finds that he gains much more than the intel- 
lect, even in its most successful enterprises, could 
ever have won. He gains a spiritual relation with 
God which touches upon, and expresses itself 
through, the condition of his entire character and 
the activities of all his outward life. He has ac- 
complished, by the way of surrender, something 
that intellect could never even have attempted to 
do. The success of intellect would have been at 
its best only the accomplishment of the prelimi- 
naries to the success of the soul and the purifica- 
tion of conduct : this method of " vision," substi- 
tuted for the processes of intellect, accomplishes 
the preliminaries and the ultimates in one. And 
the mystical language of Christianity is not un- 
derstood until it is taken as pointing to a com- 
pleted spiritual process like this ; and in this com- 



THE EELIGIOUS PEOGRAMME 67 j 

plete understanding of it one realises that Chris- ' 

tianity provides for the purification of conduct, \ 

not in spite of, but because of, the mystical element ! 

it contains. Mysticism, in short, must become yet | 

more mystical if it is to be a practical force, and | 

to correspond in its findings with the true Chris- ;i 

tian idea. It is true that the Christian programme j 

makes no such unqualified depreciation of reason ■ 

as mysticism has sometimes made. But mys- ; 

ticism has been led to make its unqualified de- j 

preciation of reason because it has looked upon j 

the method of " abandonment " it advocates sim- ^ 

ply as a substitute for reason; and the sharpness j 

of the antithesis in which it has allowed itself to | 

be caught has compelled it to reject one element j 
with something like scorn. The Christian pro- 
gramme holds that no time and labour spent in 

making our intellectual understanding of God as j 

complete as possible are spent for nought. But it ' 

declares that, after all this is done, there remains ■ 

i 

a method of " abandonment " by means of which 

intellectual findings will be confirmed, and over < 

and above that, spiritual and ethical results se- { 

cured. For its method of abandonment means, j 

not only the substitution of something else for I 

the brain as the instrument of approach to God, j 

but, once again, the whole man moving out upon j 

the whole God, and the whole God moving down | 

upon the whole man. And if it be said that the i 



1 



68 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

Christian programme, ringing with mysticism as 
it is, IS out of relation with practical life, one 
may answer boldly, " Not if it be interpreted 
mystically enough." Mysticism must stretch its 
understanding of its own terms till their connota- 
tion corresponds with the connotation in which 
the Christian programme employs them. A union 
of the whole man with the whole God is what the 
Christian programme keeps in view; and, thus 
read, thus pushed to the final point of their sig- 
nificance, its mystical terms — wherein, indeed, its 
very heart is contained — carry an inevitable im- 
plication of that ethical perfectness which they are 
sometimes supposed to ignore. 

II 

In what the Christian programme prescribes as 
to man's dealing with God, therefore, it cannot 
legitimately be held open to any charge of being 
out of relation with practical concerns. It is not 
guilty either of a forensic or of an unpractically 
mystical conception of man's relationship to God. 
On the contrary, in its ideal view of that relation- 
ship it provides for a practical ordering of Hfe 
that shall be automatically right and true. 

In its ideal view of that relationship — ^but, in- 
asmuch as the ideal relationship is not perfectly 
attained in ordinary human experience, a further 
question has to be faced. Because man does not 



THE EELIGIOUS PEOGKAMMB 69 

achieve the perfect dealing with God, Christianity 
prescribes a certain deahng of man with himself — 
a temporary religious exercise, so to call it, which 
is to be followed until the day of the perfect God- 
ward attitude shall dawn. Is it true of this, also, 
that it has a direct bearing upon the ethical order- 
ing of life, that it has practical issues, that it leads 
by a straight road to a perfecting of life on its 
practical side ? All the watchfulness and care, all 
the introspection, all the self-sacrifice, all the 
detailed commands which the Christian pro- 
gramme lays upon the man who cannot once and 
for all lose himself in God, and thus render su- 
perfluous every other religious movement — are 
there any ethical consequences from all these 
things ? 

What has to be remembered is, that the Christian 
programme, in this aspect of it, aims always at a 
spiritual self -culture which shall bring man nearer 
to that ideal spiritual condition ( of really sharing 
God's life) out of which a perfect practice is 
bound to emerge. Every precept it puts forth 
contemplates obedience to that precept, not as an 
end in itself, but as a factor in the process whereby 
the Christian makes himself ready for, and comes 
nearer to, the ideal spiritual state. And every pre- 
cept it puts forth, therefore, looks onward to 
practical consequences, however disconnected it 
may for the moment seem to be from practical 



70 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

concerns, inasmuch as the ideal spiritual condition 
it forwards implies a setting right of all the prac- 
tical issues of life. It is not so much for its own 
sake as for the sake of the spiritual culture 
brought about through obedience to it, that each 
precept goes forth — that spiritual culture, in its 
turn, leading up to a final union of man's life 
with God, and that final union issuing in a substi- 
tution of God's activities for man's. To sum- 
marise it once more — out of the ideal spiritual 
condition a perfected practice must necessarily 
come: since the ideal spiritual condition is unat- 
tained, man has to go through a process of spir- 
itual self-culture to hasten its attainment: every 
one of the Christian precepts in the common 
religious programme has, when it is obeyed, a 
reaction upon that process ; and every one of the 
Christian precepts, consequently, let its immediate 
concern be what it may, makes for a perfected 
practice in the end. 

It is necessary to emphasise this, for it is some- 
times alleged that the Christian programme, in its 
call to man for sacrifice, in its requirement of 
scrupulousness concerning matters which may 
appear somewhat remote, in its insistence upon 
the need of certain thought and feeling — in that 
entire subordinate and secondary discipline, so to 
call it, which it bids man follow till the perfect 
surrender can be achieved — is but causing man to 



THE EELIGIOUS PROGEAMME 71 



spend his strength for nought. All these things 
are looked upon as though they constituted a set 
of merely arbitrary commands, imposed simply as 
a test of man's submissiveness and constancy, and 
leading to a profitless absorption in the Christian's 
own condition — the practical side of life suffering 
in quality as a result. The facts are far otherwise. 
It is quite true that excessive emphasis may be 
set upon any or all of these things, that they may 
be attended to from inadequate motives, and with 
inadequate conceptions of the larger spiritual 
results to which they are meant to lead. But that 
does not affect the principle. In all its prescrip- 
tions the Christian programme keeps in view, as 
was said, a process of spiritual culture whereby 
the attainment of the ideal spiritual condition, 
with its consequent ethical perfecting of life, shall 
be hastened on. And it never calls for a mere 
emotionalism that begins and ends in itself, for a 
merely arbitrary dealing with mind and heart, for 
a purposeless sacrifice whose virtue lies only in its 
own pain. 

When, for example, it bids man take order with 
his inmost thoughts, care not only for that which 
is without, but for that which is within, it is not 
because it holds that kind of introspection to have 
any special virtue in itself that it issues its com- 
mand. It bases the command upon the undeni- 
able truth that even the momentary thought, 



n THE CHEISTIAX METHOD OF ETHICS 

coming and going, and thus apparently done 
with, may do something to estabhsh a tendency 
in the nature it visits, and that, according to the 
Tightness or wrongness of the tendency so estab- 
hshed or confirmed, a soul may be helped or re- 
tarded in its progress toward the ideal union with 
God, and consequently, in its progress toward a 
perfectly ordered ethical life. The subtle cur- 
rents of thought — the momentary stirrings of 
emotion — the attention wherewith for just an 
instant the mind listens to some suggestion which 
it can itself hardly identify, some suggestion 
casually flung in from a voice that chanced to be 
wafted by — the countless thousands of moods 
and tempers and dispositions whose visits to us 
appear to make no mark of which, after they are 
gone, we can say, This is the trace they have 
left " — all these things, the Christian programme 
declares, count and tell in that spiritual culture 
which the Christian man must maintain. They 
make the man — the character and tendency in 
him — if they make nothing else. And the Chris- 
tian programme insists on care and watchfulness 
about these things simply because the treatment 
of these things bears upon the achievement of the 
final spiritual and ethical idea. 

Similarly, when the Christian programme bids 
the Christian man keep himself constantly on 
guard as he threads his v/ay through the various 



THE EELIGIOUS PROGKAMME 

Circumstances of his life, look upon himself as one 
who moves in a hostile land where foes may be 
lying ambushed on every side, and remember 
that even beneath the appearance of innocence 
some possibilities of moral disaster may lurk, it 
is not because it esteems an attitude of aloofness 
or of opposition as desirable for its own sake that 
it calls for this attitude of suspicious vigilance. 
The call is based upon the truth that the question 
of man's positive moral and spiritual culture is 
in all things to be supreme, and never even for a 
moment to be dropped out of mind. It takes into 
account the fact that even situations which appear 
to be morally neutral and colourless may, when 
brought to the bar of an unsleeping spiritual 
judgment, look far other than they did before: 
many an angel who seemed at a first glance to be 
clothed in heaven's white the while he summoned 
us, may turn out, when we compel him to repeat 
his call in the presence of a divinely-kindled spir- 
itual sensitiveness, to be but a tempting devil in 
disguise ; and for that reason, if for no other, the 
Christian programme bids us bring all possibili- 
ties, innocent as they may appear, into the spir- 
itual world, the spiritual resting-place, before we 
drop into their inviting arms. Baneful conse- 
quences may come upon the spiritual develop- 
ment going on within us from things that look at 
first as if they could affect that spiritual develop- 



74 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

ment not at all. This call, moreover, takes into 
account the fact that many elements of man's 
environment, while not specifically good or bad in 
themselves, may nevertheless have some moral 
and spiritual reaction upon man's life : often and 
often is man confronted by various solicitations 
and opportunities, coming upon him through his 
contact with the world outside, none of which 
may possess any distinctive moral quality at all, 
but which may yet tend, some of them to the 
growth and strengthening, and others of them to 
the check and weakening, of that spiritual devel- 
opment and tendency in him whereby he is being 
carried on to the realisation of the ultimate Chris- 
tian ideal: it is one of the wonders of life that 
w^e may do something which is in itself harmless, 
and yet be ourselves the less spiritual for having 
done it, and may take some course which has no 
special virtue in it, and yet be spiritually con- 
firmed thereby. And it is with these facts in 
view that the Christian programme calls for an 
attitude of ceaseless vigilance, not to say suspi- 
cion, on the Christian's part. The maintenance 
of such an attitude bears upon the achievement 
of the final spiritual and ethical ideal. 

And once again, when the Christian pro- 
gramme calls for self-sacrifice, bids the rich man 
sell what he has and give to the poor (whether 
or no the particular command, given on a par- 



THE EELIGIOUS PROGEAMME 75 

ticular occasion in the ministry of Christ, is uni- 
versally and permanently binding or not in sim- 
ilar cases, is not for the moment the question) it 
is still with a view to the furtherance of spiritual 
culture that the demand is put forth. It is not 
for the sake of sacrifice itself, but for the sake of 
the reaction from the sacrifice upon the spiritual 
tendencies of character, that sacrifice is incul- 
cated. Indeed, the principle underlying the spe- 
cial command in the case alluded to is simply this 
— " Do that which your circumstances suggest 
as the direct method, for you, of making the 
spiritual development of your nature secure." 
The young man's riches might be the weight to 
sink him down from all that was good ; but they 
might be, on the other hand, the means of letting 
holy graces sweep through his life, if he used 
them rightly : and he was to give himself to that 
particular method of developing spiritual quality 
which the circumstances of his life had opened to 
him. It is, indeed, only when this underlying 
principle of the demand for sacrifice is grasped 
that the universal pressure of the demand is per- 
ceived. So far are we from explaining it away 
when we thus pass from its outward form to its 
underlying and penetrating essence, that we make 
it impossible for anyone to escape its grasp. Sac- 
rifice in this way becomes binding upon all,, 
whether or no they own goods of which they 



76 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

might dispossess themselves for the poor's sake. 
Sacrifice, indeed, is called for, because that turn- 
ing of life to spiritual account, which is the prin- 
ciple beneath the demand, simply means sacrifice 
— the greatest sacrifice of which human nature is 
capable. To live ever watchful for opportunities 
of spiritual culture and advantage, caring for 
life only as it affords such opportunities, anxious 
to turn all experiences and all circumstances into 
food for the inner life — 'that is to be in the world 
but not of it; and to be in the world but not of 
it is precisely the sacrifice required. When the 
Christian programme calls for sacrifice, it calls 
for something that all can offer, be they rich 
or poor, high or humble — the sacrifice of living 
only for the spiritual, of making all things spir- 
itual by the consecration of the use to which they 
are put. The fact that it is in connection with 
wealth that sacrifice is most frequently alluded 
to, though natural enough (since wealth has the 
most patent and obvious means at its command of 
manifesting the spirit of sacrifice), must not blind 
us to the truth that the essence of the sacrifice 
required by the Christian programme lies, not 
in the mere giving up of something, but in the 
turning of life's ordinary circumstances, what- 
ever they may be, to purposes of holy culture 
and spiritual advance. The Christian pro- 
gramme calls for sacrifice, because sacrifice, when 



THE EELIGIOUS PROGRAMME 77 

its principle is rightly understood, bears directly 
upon the achievement of the final spiritual and 
ethical ideal. 

We repeat, therefore, that the Christian pro- 
gramme — in the entire subordinate and secondary 
discipline which it bids man follow till the per- 
fect surrender to God can be achieved — aims al- 
ways at a spiritual self-culture which shall bring 
man nearer to that ideal spiritual condition 
whence a perfect practice is bound to issue. Every 
one of the Christian precepts makes for a perfected 
ethics in the end. And thus we have made the 
point which in the present chapter we set out to 
make, have seen how the religious programme of 
Christianity not only demands, but creates, an 
automatic right rectitude of practice, and how 
religious attainment and ethical completeness are 
not two things but one. 



I 



THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE I 

j 

BUT we have really done more than this. ■ 

We have made the transition to the ethical I 

principle, the ethical method, for every day and \ 

for every problem of every day, and have reached I 

a conception of the manner in which the Christian 1 
conscience, applied to all common and uncommon 

questions of conduct, ought to work. We are i 

prepared, in other words, to pass from the ulti- | 

mate ethical ideal to the ethical procedure which ; 

the Christian, in default of realising that ultimate ! 

ethical ideal, has for the time being to adopt. \ 

The ultimate Christian ethical ideal, as we have : 

seen, takes man as not really concerned with i 

ethical questions at all, but as putting himself | 

into such a spiritual adjustment that ethical ques- } 

tions settle themselves: it views him as adopting j 

an automatic right attitude to every circumstance, '. 

as maintaining an instinctive right bearing ; 

toward every problem of duty and every tempta- ! 

tion to wrong. But, inasmuch as that condition j 
of automatic ethical self-adjustment is not yet 

attained, what is the Christian man to do ? How , 

78 ' 



THE CHEISTIAN CONSCIENCE 79 

is he to guide himself among the practical issues 
of his life? To what standard and along what 
lines is his conscience to work? Just as Chris- 
tianity provides what we have termed a second- 
any religious programme for the Christian dis- 
ciple — a secondary programme for the disciple's 
spiritual self-culture and self-discipline which the 
disciple is to follow till his life is really one with 
God's — so we have somehow to provide for the 
Christian's observance a secondary ethical pro- 
gramme which shall guide him till the ultimate 
ethical ideal be won. How, as he proceeds 
toward the final goal, can the Christian man dis- 
cover the true key to the many doors which he 
must pass through on the way ? It is the answer 
to this inquiry we have now to seek. Or rather, 
we have to show that the answer to it has already 
been found. 

I 

The ultimate religious ideal and the ultimate 
ethical ideal, as we have seen, fulfil themselves 
together; for that seizing by the life of God upon 
the life of man, that dropping of the life of man 
into the life of God, whereof the ultimate religious 
ideal speaks, involves, necessarily, the supplant- 
ing of man's activity by God's own, and thus 
provides for that automatic adoption of right 
courses wherein the ultimate ethical attainment 



80 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

consists. And in the secondary religious pro- 
gramme, in the programme rendered needful 
by man's present failure to carry the ultimate pro- 
gramme through, the same close connection be- 
tween the religious life and the ethical is, as 
we have also seen, still maintained; for through 
all the disciplines imposed by that secondary 
programme the realisation of the united religious 
and ethical ideals is steadily kept in view; and 
the process of that realisation — the fact that the 
Christian man is engaged in it — is looked on as 
regulative of the Christian man's attitude towards 
the world and towards all the circumstances of 
his common life. We have seen, in fact, looking 
at things from the religious point of view as 
distinct from the ethical, that we are nevertheless 
compelled to take the ethical also into the range 
of our vision. We have seen that, both at the 
highest stage of development and at the inter- 
mediate stages, the inner religious life and the 
outer practical life are, according to the Christian 
reading, in closest relationship — and in relation- 
ship constituted not merely by some bond of 
logical antecedence and sequence, not merely by 
some scheduled order of succession, but in a much 
more vital and organic way. It is, of course, at 
the loftiest stage of spiritual development — when 
(if it were only attained) spiritual life and ethical 
practice would be, so to say, like two suns which 



I 



THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE 81 

have at last come to lie exactly edge on edge, 
and have been fused into one — that this close j 
relationship would be most perfectly discerned. \ 
But even at the lower and intermediate stages \ 
the Christian religious programme founds itself | 
upon that same relationship, and, although com- j 
pelled to admit that between the inner religious ' 
life and the outer practical life there is no such | 
mutual permeation, fusion, interpenetration, as 
would be brought about by the perfecting of the | 
first, insists, at least, upon the action and reaction J 
of the two as a governmental fact. The Christian j 
programme presents man as enwrapped in the ■ 
spiritual development that is going on within j 
him, as being ever conscious of its goal, as mak- 
ing that remembrance and that consciousness j 
regulative of his dealing with all contingencies, ; 
and as then finding his spiritual development in | 
its turn helped on toward the ever-beckoning goal j 
by the reflex action of the practical concerns ; 
themselves. The progressive spiritual life is to { 
manifest itself through, to dictate to, and to feed j 
itself by, the ethical activities of each successive i 
hour. The close relationship which is absolute | 
fusion at its highest point, and which is to be j 
ceaselessly anticipated under that aspect by the 
ceaselessly progressive soul, is at least to be main- j 
tained as action and reaction while the lower ] 
stages are passed through. 1 



S2 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

In common life, however, the Christian man 
has constantly to attack the matter from the other 
end; and it is from the fact that he has some 
ethical problem to grapple with immediately 
rather than from the fact that he is passing 
through a process of spiritual development where- 
to all things are to be subservient, that he is 
compelled to start. While the religious pro- 
gramme of Christianity views him primarily as 
a, developing spiritual nature, as realising him- 
self to be that, and as never reaching out upon 
the practical problems of this life except from 
his standpoint in that consciously apprehended de- 
velopment, the Christian man, as a matter of 
fact, does not thus at first see all things in the 
light of, and as related to, the spiritual process 
going on within. His consciousness of himself 
as a developing spiritual nature is not a constant 
thing: it is not always at home, so to say, to 
receive the ethical problem when it comes knock- 
ing at the door; and it is not as held within that 
consciousness, and as equipped by it for judging, 
that the Christian man unintermittently faces 
the practical questions of his days. According 
to the religious view, it is to a growing divine 
life in man, alertly and livingly conscious of itself 
and watchful of its interests, that ethical prob- 
lems always present themselves. They are al- 
ways the second thing to arrive ; and they do but 



THE CHEISTIAK CONSCIENCE 83 



defile past while the regnant spirituality sits un- 
moved upon its throne. According to actual 
fact, the throne itself is frequently unoccupied 
when the ethical problems appear. Even the 
secondary programme of religion, as we have 
called it, does not so permanently grip the Chris- 
tian man that he is always conscious of himself 
as carrying it through. And ethical questions, as 
one by one they appear, consequently involve a 
repeated reconstitution of the court in which they 
are to be tried. 

Nevertheless it is in that ceaseless action and 
reaction between the inward life and the outward 
activity, whereon the religious programme insists 
— it is in this that we can find the secret of the 
Christian's bearing among the practical difficul- 
ties and problems of each successive day. If the 
consciousness of being engaged in a development 
of the divine life be not palpitating within, the 
revivification of that consciousness is the one 
thing needful when the ethical problem makes its 
appeal : if it be not at home when the practical 
question comes knocking, let it be at once fetched 
back. If the relation between the inward spir- 
itual development and the outward activity be 
not, so far as its first term is concerned, ante- 
cedently prepared, let it be made, or rather re- 
made, at the moment of the crisis. The Christian 
man must, as it were, work the formula back- 



84 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



wards. The distinctly religious programme of 
things says, " Here is a nature wherein the de- 
velopment of the life of God through Christ has 
reached a definite point, and is going on toward 
the ultimate goal — and this developing life, con- 
scious of itself and of its destiny, is to be brought 
into a relationship of action and reaction with 
outward activities and practical concerns." The 
Christian man, having failed to keep at its full 
height the consciousness of a developing divine 
life within, and not having made that conscious- 
ness antecedently as operative as it should have 
been, is to say when the ethical problem clamours, 
"Here are outward activities and practical con- 
cerns — and they are to be brought into a relation- 
ship of action and reaction with that inner process 
of a divine life's development wherein my na- 
ture is engaged." He must, in brief, before each 
new question on the side of doing, realise himself 
afresh on the side of being, become freshly con- 
scious of himself as on the road to the ultimate 
spiritual ideal, and from that standpoint surve)^ 
the new question he is called upon to face. 

II 

What this really means is that the divine life in 
the Christian, in its actuality and its potentiality, 
is to govern each ethical situation as it emerges 
into view and presents its appeal. It is not he, 



THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE 85 



but God present in him through Christ, that is to 
deal with the successive problems of practical 
conduct, and to pronounce the decisive word at 
every crisis of life: it is not merely as a man 
specially endowed, but as a Christian' — that is, as 
a man whose life is identified with, and in meas- 
ure supplanted by, the life of God in Christ — 
that the Christian is to face the ethical questions 
of his days; and in this matter of ethical judging 
and decision, as in all other matters, the true line 
is given in the apostle's affirmation that it was 
not he, but Christ in him, that lived. When we 
say that the Christian man must, before each new 
question on the side of doing, realise himself 
afresh on the side of being, become freshly con- 
scious of himself as on the road to the ultimate 
spiritual ideal, and from that standpoint survey 
the new question he is called upon to face, it is 
not meant simply that he is to recall the idea of 
the spiritual development wherein he is engaged. 
What is meant is that this spiritual development, 
the developing spiritual life, is itself to become 
regnant over the position. The Christian man is, 
at the hour of difficulty, to suspend his self-activ- 
ity and to permit the Christ-activity to have the 
directive place which, as a matter of fact, it ought 
always to have, but from which the assertive 
self-hood of the Christian man too frequently 
keeps it away. It is the divine life in the Chris- 



86 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



tian, in its actuality and its potentiality, that is to 
govern the ethical crisis as it comes. The divine 
life in its actuality ; for the divine life is in meas- 
ure already in possession of the Christian man, 
if he be at all worthy of the name. The divine 
life in its potentiality; for if the divine life be 
really present it will be stretching on within the 
Christian toward the fuller realisation of its own 
ideal, and will further that fuller realisation by 
every exercise of itself that it makes. The divine 
life is to deal with the practical problems, both 
expressing and developing itself by so doing — 
so establishing that relation of action and reac- 
tion whereof we spoke before. It must, indeed, 
develop itself in the very act of expressing itself ; 
for, being actual life, it cannot fail to strengthen 
itself. As life always does strengthen 
itself, by each due performance of its functions. 
The point just now to be chiefly insisted upon, 
however, is that it is the actual divine life within 
the Christian that is to direct and rule. The 
Christian man is to become conscious of himself 
on the side of being when the practical question 
comes up, — yet it is not his consciousness of be- 
ing something, but the fact of his being some- 
thing, or rather it is that actual something itself, 
which is to be the operating and determining 
power. Nor is it by an effort of imagination that 
th,e Christian man equips himself for a grappling 



THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIEl^CE 87 



with the practical concerns. It is by an actual 
movement of his own life and of the Christ-life 
within him, a movement that swings each to its 
proper place. It is not a matter of imagination 
— or, if in any degree it be this, it is imagination 
that goes far to fulfil itself. The Christian man 
is to become freshly conscious of himself as a 
Christian man, and of what is implied therein as 
to his actual condition and as to his spiritual 
ideal: he is to realise himself as engaged in a 
process of developing identification with the di- 
vine life, and to anticipate, so far as is possible, 
what that process will lead to when it is complete ; 
but, by the terms, the process anticipated or imag- 
ined as complete is already being actually carried 
on; and the Christian's very consciousness of 
what he is and of what he is to be, is really, if it 
be genuine, the divine life within him energising 
and bearing witness to itself. And so, once 
again, it is not the Christian's consciousness of 
the divine life — not his mere intellectual convic- 
tion that he is being made by the divine life — 
that is to be brought to bear upon the ethical prob- 
lems : it is the divine life itself that is to deal with 
the problems and to decide. The Christian, con- 
fronted by the crisis, gets into the background 
where he should have been all the while, and 
calls upon the divine life within him to take its 
power and reign. He withdraws, to let the 



88 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



Christ-life in him take sway. He reaHses himself 
— not in the mind only, but through all his na- 
ture — on the side of being, and thus transformed 
(not merely illuminated or strengthened, but 
transformed) goes out to meet the problem that 
waits. Or, instead of saying that the Christian 
man realises himself afresh on the side of being, 
one might put it that the Christ-life, which is in 
measure making him already, and which is press- 
ing on in him to its fulness, realises itself afresh 
in him, and comes to its own. At any rale, it is 
the divine life in the Christian, actual and poten- 
tial, that is to govern and master each ethical 
situation as it comes into view. It is the divine 
life in the Christian, both expressing and devel- 
oping itself in its dealing with the position, that 
is at the hour of every new practical decision to 
be regnant and supreme. 

To put the matter in this way is by no means 
to countenance a mere subjectivity in ethics, or to 
make the standard of conduct liable to constant 
variation at individual caprice. " In thus throw- 
ing the different ethical decisions entirely upon 
something within a man," it may be said, " in- 
stead of looking upon them as being rightly taken 
only when they result from a man's desire to con- 
form himself to some outside rule or ideal, you 
are allowing every man to be a law unto him- 
self, and thus bringing confusion into the whole 



THE CHEISTIAN CONSCIEi^CE 89 

ethical scheme." By no means. For it must be 
remembered that the conception here advocated is 
that of the action of one constant power — the 
divine life of God, through Christ, in possession 
of the whole nature — within every Christian man. 
Different as men may be, the power within them 
is, according to the conception, always the same ; 
and this power, could it speak its word and have 
its way unhindered, would necessarily, being 
itself unchanged, come always to a uniform ethi- 
cal decision and produce always a uniform ethical 
result. As a matter of fact, the view which has 
here been taken implies a deliverance from sub- 
jectivity, rather than an establishment of it; for it 
is not the man, but the divine life (working with- 
in man, indeed, but yet not man) that is consid- 
ered to be dealing with the practical problems of 
life. Perfectly translated into experience, this 
view would eliminate all differences of moral 
judgment on the human side, inasmuch as every 
human judgment would be but another instance 
of the same divine life judging through all — and, 
the judge being the same, the judgment must be 
unvaried too. It is true that, at the present level 
of human experience. Christian men may, accord- 
ing to their varying degrees of self-identifica- 
tion with the divine life, arrive at varying inter- 
pretations of what that divine life in them de- 
clares. But an objection of similar order may be 



90 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



taken to any system which relies upon some ex- 
ternal standard of conducto For under any given 
conditions men will differently conceive the neces- 
sary applications and requirements of that ex- 
ternal standard: their individual temperament 
and mood and intellectual bias will colour their 
reading of the entire position, even though the 
ultimate testing principle lie quite separate from 
themselves; and it is impossible to escape alto- 
gether from the subjective element, even by the 
setting up of some objective rule. The view 
here taken provides, at any rate, as other views 
do not, for a final freedom from that subjectivity 
which, for the present, does not cease to intrude. 
The life of God, were men entirely in its posses- 
sion and entirely identified therewith, would in 
all men have but one voice. Precisely because the 
view for which we have been contending looks 
to the taking of all ethical decisions by one con- 
stant thing within every man — by something 
which, although working within man, is yet not 
of man but of God — it can repel the charge of 
subjectivity, and can declare that, so far from 
establishing subjectivity, it has banished it from 
the moral field. 

Nor, let it be briefly noted (although the point 
will be more clearly seen when we come to deal 
directly with the Christian's relations with his 
fellow-men), does this view make for any self- 



THE CHEISTIAN CONSCIENCE 91 



centred and individualistic conduct of life. It 
loses nothing, for example, that is possessed by 
any system wherein the law of love is proclaimed 
as the decisive factor. In saying that the divine 
life in the Christian man, both expressing and 
developing itself in its dealing with the position, 
is to govern each ethical situation as it comes 
into view, do we become too individualistic, 
leave insufficient scope for altruism, and remove 
man's relations with man too far from their 
rightful place in the moral scheme ? Not so. For 
the " divine life " which is to become govern- 
mental is itself " love," since Love is one of God's 
loftiest names ; and the divine life, expressing it- 
self through its dealing with any ethical situation, 
cannot fail to express itself as love so far as the 
situation permits or requires, and, developing it- 
self through its dealing with any ethical situation, 
cannot fail to make the man it is progressively 
mastering more loving still, so far as the situa- 
tion gives scope so to do. To hold the actual 
divine life in man for the controlling and direct- 
ive ethical power is to give full room to love — for 
God Himself is Love. 

One other word remains to be said before we 
pass on. We have seen how the spiritual ideal, 
already partly realised, and continuously making 
progress toward a fuller self-realisation, is to gov- 
ern the ethical ideals of every passing hour. We 



92 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

have seen in what way that close relation between 
the management of the inner life and the manage- 
ment of the outer — that relation which is abso- 
lute fusion at its highest point — is to be main- 
tained as action and reaction while the lower 
stages of experience are passed through. That 
is, we have done what at the outset we saw was 
necessary to do. We have related the ideals to 
the ideal 

III 

The function of conscience, in the Christian 
man, is to decide whether or no ethical problems 
are being dealt with in the indicated way — to 
give warning that this is the way in which they 
should be dealt with, and to reprove if any other 
way be adopted. In other words, the inner 
voice which for men outside the distinctively 
Christian rank declares that they must choose 
the path of right, becomes in distinctively Chris- 
tian men a voice declaring that not they, but the 
divine life in them, must make the choice.^ 

Let it be remembered, in this connection, that 
even conscience (for the moment it is not the 
specially Christian conscience, but conscience in 
general, of which we speak) is not, strictly taken, 

1 For the completion of the statement concerning the 
function of conscience, see page 240. 



THE CHEISTIAN CONSCIENCE 93 

an infallible guide to conduct — though it is often 
spoken of as if it were. Conscience, even at its 
very best, tells us whether we have selected, out 
of the various possible courses open to us, the one 
which we judged to be right : it does not assure 
us that the course we have judged to be right is 
really so. It is impulse and motive, not action 
itself, whereof conscience is judge. Through 
conscience a man knows whether or not he has 
been faithful to what his mind estimated as the 
higher of two alternatives; but whether the al- 
ternative he has estimated as the higher is, when 
judged by the absolute standard, the higher in 
truth, is another question altogether. In our 
ordinary speech we talk about conscience deciding 
between this and that, settling upon this method 
of life as being conformable to the law of good- 
ness and rejecting that other method of life as 
being out of harmony with the requirements of 
that law; and in our ordinary speech, perhaps, 
this may be allowed to pass. We put together, 
so to say, the process of determining which 
method of life appears to be the right one, and 
the other process of self-approval or self-disap- 
proval which goes on within us according to our 
obedience or disobedience to the indications of 
the first; and we speak of conscience as the fac- 
ulty in us which performs them both. But, if 
we are to aim at exactitude of expression, we 



94 THE CHEISTIA^T METHOD OF ETHICS 

are compelled to declare that conscience does 
but acquit or condemn us as having- adopted or 
spurned what our minds held to be right, — but 
that, whether the judgment of our minds as to 
what is right was a judgment accurate and true, 
a judgment which God, did we present it to Him, 
would confirm, it is not within the province of 
conscience to pronounce. Conscience is the 
voice within everlastingly reminding man that 
right is the one thing to be exalted above all else ; 
it is not a voice explaining to man what right is/ 
Let a man look into his conscience, and he will 
know whether, when he made his decision just 
now, he made it because he thought right com- 
manded it, or because some meaner motive was 
allowed to have sway; and he will be at peace 
on that point if conscience applauds, ashamed \ 
if it look on him with a frown ; he will not know j 
whether, when he made his decision, he was not | 
leaving out of his reckoning elements which 
should have entered in, and whose absence vitiates 
the decision at which he arrived. Conscience ^ 
simply declares that what is judged to be right 
should at all costs be done. 

For the Christian man, the verdict of his own 
mind as to what is right is to be supplanted, as 
we have seen, by the decision of the divine life in 
him. And conscience, still sitting as monitor and 
judge, judges now a different cause. It decides, 



1 



THE CHEISTIAN" CON-SCIENCE 95 



not whether the man has followed his sense of 
right, but whether he has permitted the divine 
life in him to be the guiding power. Just as, for 
men outside the distinctively Christian rank, con- 
science judges actions, not in themselves, but in 
their relation to what is believed to be right ; so, 
for the Christian man, conscience judges actions, 
not in themselves, but in their relation to the 
divine life which is progressively realising itself 
within — applauds or condemns the actions them- 
selves according as it is or is not from the actual 
initiative of that divine life that they proceed. 
The terms of the inquiry whereto conscience 
furnishes the answer have, for a rightly ordered 
Christian experience, been changed. The inquiry 
is no longer, " Has the man done what he believed 
to be the right?" but "Is it the man himself, 
or the divine life in the man, God in him through 
Christ, by whom the thing has been done? Is it 
the progressive spiritual life in the man that is 
manifesting itself in, dictating to, and feeding 
itself by, the ethical activity of this particular 
hour? " And according to the " yea " or " nay 
wherewith the Christianised conscience answers 
its own question does the Christian man, at each 
successive moral crisis of his life, stand vindicated 
or condemned. 

It is for this message, then, as it issues from 
the inner voice, that the Christian man must listen 



96 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



if he would know what, from the Christian stand- 
point, the moral quality of his own acts is found 
to be. To the inward monitor which emphasises 
the necessity of substituting the decisions and 
the activity of the divine life within him for the 
decisions and the activity that spring from the 
self in him, he must ever give watchful and alert 
heed if he would save himself from reproach. 
It is quite true that the Christian man, living 
under the direction of his voice, will sometimes 
be brought, in the final issue, to the same outward 
deed as the man who, under ordinary operation 
of conscience, pursues what his judgment chooses 
as the true course ; so that for the world at large, 
as it watches, there may be no clearly marked 
difference between the treatment accorded to the 
moral problem by the two. But the spirit of the 
two actions, correspondent as they may be in 
external features, will nevertheless be altogether 
different — a fact which even the world at large 
will not seldom be able to discern: it will be to 
two wholly irreconcilable schemes of living that 
the two actions, with all their outward similari- 
ties, belong; and, in any event, the fact that the 
different initiative principles produce ultimately 
the same result will be only, so to say, an acci- 
dental circumstance in the case. And on the other 
side, let it be remembered that the Christian man, 
listening to the pronouncements of this inner 



THE CHEISTIAN CONSCIENCE 97 

voice, may often, as he looks back on his treat- 
ment of a moral crisis, be obliged to pronounce it 
faulty, not because it was so in itself, but because 
it was not from the direct initiative of the divine 
life in him that it sprang. Action may be right 
in itself, and yet, from the Christian point of 
view, may lack the highest quality. If the Chris- 
tian fails to deal with a problem of conduct, with 
a moral question, distinctly as a Christian — from 
the heart and shelter of his Christian experience, 
as one whose life is identified with and lost in the 
divine — then he has fallen below himself, and the 
inner voice will condemn. An action initiated 
in self, rather than in the life that is intended 
to supplant self, does not satisfy the requirements 
of the Christian conscience, even though against 
the action, as it stands upon the record, no charge 
may lie. Unless it was the progressive divine 
life within that manifested itself in, dictated to, 
and fed itself by, the action under review, the 
essential quality was not there. The mere acci- 
dent that the wrong method led to a right result 
is not sufficient to ward off blame. And the 
Christian man, let it be repeated, must therefore 
give watchful and earnest heed to that inner 
voice which emphasises the necessity of letting 
the divine life within keep all initiative, take 
every decision, and perform every action as from 
itself, if he would save himself from reproach. 



98 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

Conscience, for the distinctively Christian man, 
must be taken as a monitor declaring that not 
he, but the divine life in him, is to make the 
choice; and in that sense must it be heard and 
obeyed. 

IV 

It is not suggested that the Christian man, en- 
deavouring to hear and to follow the dictates of 
this inner voice, must infallibly be right in all his 
dealings with the moral problems of his life. For 
however keen may be his realisation of the fact 
that only indirectly, and through his abandon- 
ment to the divine life in him, should he attack 
those problems, the actual self-abandonment he 
makes remains, even at his spiritually most in- 
tense moments, incomplete: it is still, to some 
extent, the man himself as man, not altogether 
the man as Christian, that determines the practi- 
cal issues: the purely human initiative does not 
wholly give way to, nor does the purely human 
judgment wholly sink itself in, the other and 
higher. It was pointed out before that in the 
ordinary moral operations of men (leaving the 
distinctively Christian method out of account) 
there are two stages — the first stage being the 
declaration of conscience that right must be su- 
preme, and the second stage being the mind's 
delivery of its considered verdict as to what, in 



THE CHEISTIAN CONSCIENCE 99 

any given situation, actually constitutes the right 
which is to rule. Even in current Christian ex- 
perience a similar dualism is not transcended 
The first stage is now the declaration o£ the 
Christianised conscience that not the man himself, 
but the divine life in him, is to deal with the 
case. The second stage, which ought to be the 
infallible dealing, on the part of the divine life, 
with the question at issue, becomes, as a matter 
of fact, a dealing with the question at issue, 
partly by the divine life whereto the Christian 
man is genuinely abandoned, and partly by the 
man as man — by his own judgment, his own 
natural estimates, his own balancing of pros and 
cons. There is still some scope allowed, or 
taken, for the action of that purely human con- 
sideration of matters which, according to the 
Christian theory, has died into the activity of the 
divine life. The assertive self-hood, even of the 
Christian man, wrests from that life which is not 
himself, but God in him, something of its pre- 
rogative, and reserves for human judgment some- 
thing o"f the field whence human judgment should 
have retired. And, since in the Christian man, 
no less than in others, judgment may easily go 
astray, the Christian, at his present level, is not 
guaranteed against a mistaken choice. 

It should be noted, however, that on this view 
of what obedience to the Christian conscience 



100 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

consists in, an ultimate infallibility of practice is 
provided for, and the Christian, if he does not 
attain it, is at least set upon the road thereto. 
For obviously a complete self-abandonment to 
the divine life within, an utter yielding of all 
decision and all initiative to its power, would 
secure that infallibility, since the divine life could 
do no wrong. Even a perfect obedience to con- 
science, outside the distinctively Christian 
method, offers no complete safeguard against 
error, inasmuch as, after conscience has made 
its proclamation of the supremacy of right, judg- 
ment has to take the matter up and decide where- 
in the right consists. As a matter otf fact, histo-ry 
records many crimes committed by men zealous 
for right and eager to obey what they understood 
to be the conscience-call : it is a commonplace that 
the greater enlightenment of later ages has fre- 
quently condemned as evil not a few courses of 
action which, in the day when men adopted them, 
were held to be inspired by heaven. But in a 
perfect obedience to the Christianised conscience 
the perfect safeguard, unattainable else, would 
most assuredly be won; for under that initiative 
and activity of the life of God in man, to which 
the Christianised conscience declares all moral 
problems must be handed over, error could in no 
wise creep in. The divine Hfe, fully constituting, 
fully re-constituting, the man, could do no wrong. 



THE CHEISTIAN CONSCIENCE 101 

It is by the adoption of the view we have been 
advocating, therefore, that swiftest progress will 
be accomplished towards an infallible dealing 
with all the ethical crises of human life: though 
not yet attained, that infallible dealing at least 
comes mare and more clearly within the range of 
vision as we progressively conform ourselves to 
the bidding of conscience, as it should utter its 
message to the Christian nature ; and all the lim- 
itations and mistakes of human judgment are 
little by little transcended, little by little become of 
no account, as fallible human judgment yields 
its place to the regnant energising of God and 
God's life within. A perfect ethical code, if not 
reached, is at least provided for as an ultimate 
when the Christian man rightly interprets the 
imperative of conscience, and begins to yield him- 
self to its voice. 

On similar lines, it is evident that under this 
interpretation of the voice of conscience, as it 
speaks in the Christian man, and by an endeavour 
to obey its dictates, the Christian reaches to a 
greater likelihood (greater in precise proportion 
to the measure of the obedience he renders) of 
being right in any ethical decision he may take. 
His abandonment to the life of God within him 
is not complete, and in so far as it is incomplete 
the certainty of rectitude is destroyed; but the 
abandonment is at least in part performed, and 



102 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OP ETHICS 

in so far as it is performed the probability of 
rectitude grows. There is at least a higher ele- 
ment of judgment introduced into the Christian 
man's deaHng with any moral crisis; and he is 
more likely, a priori, to take the true path 
through all moral entanglements, inasmuch as 
the infallible Counsellor, while not having it all 
his own way, nevertheless does take a real share 
in the determination of the issue. One may go so 
far as to say that even the ordinary moral in- 
stincts of the Christian man will work more truly 
for being in contact with that divine power in 
which they ought to be entirely lost. In any case, 
the Christian man, in so far as he deserves the 
name, has within him something which, even 
with its partial rule and its hampered sovereignty, 
increases his chances of rightly managing his life 
and elevates him, other things being equal, to a 
position of superiority over those whose natural 
moral instinct is left to its work unassisted by 
any higher power. 

This, of course, is on the presumption that, at 
the moment of crisis, he who claims to be Chris- 
tian does call upon the divine life within him to 
take such part in the control of the crisis as his 
imperfect spiritual experience permits. The pity 
of it is, however, that so many Christian men, 
face to face with some ethical crisis, forget the 
power they have at their command, forget for 



THE CHRISTIAN CON"SCIENCE 103 

the time being that they are Christian men, and 
address themselves to the task of estimate and 
judgment, not as Christians, but simply as men. 
They make no call upon the divine life within 
them : they rather stand aside from it while they 
deliberate and choose: they wilfully fling away 
their advantages, and reduce themselves, for the 
purpose of grappling with the crisis, to the level 
of all the rest. It is on their own judgment that 
they throw themselves back — their poor, dazed, 
halting judgment, which has not even in them 
completely shaken itself free from the influences 
that prevent it from acting faithfully, which even 
in them may be so greatly warped by other judg- 
ments round about it — their narrow, short- 
sighted judgment, peering with infinite difliculty 
just a little way into the darkness encompassing 
it, and seeing the shape and size of everything 
wrong. It is quite true, as has been previously 
admitted, and as will be emphasised again, that 
even in the Christian man judgment must in the 
last resort be called upon to do its part. But as 
far as the Christian judges at all, he only judges 
to any purpose as he realises that he ought not to 
judge. And it needs to be solemnly remembered 
that, so long as man acts on unaided judgment 
alone, the way that seems right may be the way 
of evil — and this is as true for the Christian man 
as for any other. And the Christian man, when 



104 THE CHKISTIAN" METHOD OF ETHICS 



he thus lets his moral deliberations begin and end 
in himself, takes a risk that is as needless as it is 
great, for, being a Christian, he has open to him 
better and safer lines on which to work. And as 
it has been said that the Christian man, using 
his possibilities, has the greater likelihood of 
being right in the moral decisions he takes, so 
must the correlative truth also be set down — that 
the Christian man, not using his possibilities, has 
the less excuse if he go astray. He cannot say 
that, having done what appeared to him to be 
right, he is entitled to go free from blame. He 
cannot make that claim until he has obtained for 
the problems of life and conduct all the light and 
all the inspiration that are to be won — and he has 
not done that unless he has called upon the divine 
life within him to act. In measure the same prin- 
ciple holds good for all men ; and none can escape 
censure on the plea of having taken the seemingly 
right course so long as they despise the divine 
assistance in finding what the right course is. 
But for the Christian man the principle is of spe- 
cially binding force; for he has the divine life 
within him, and his fault is all the greater if he 
allow it to remain latent, so to say, when the hour 
of moral decision arrives. " I did what seemed 
to be the right thing : surely I cannot be harshly 
dealt with, even if my decision was at fault." 
Yes, but the question must be carried a step 



THE CHEISTIAN CONSCIENCE 105 



further back before the Christian man is entitled 
to feel at his ease. This may have seemed the 
right thing; but there is the next question, 
Ought it to have seemed the right thing ? Would 
it have seemed the right thing if all possible 
means had been taken to find out what the right 
thing is? And the Christian man cannot say 
that he is thus doing all that is possible to him 
for the true control of life on its practical side, 
cannot claim that he is using all the forces at 
his command, till, at each return of question and 
problem, he summons into action that divine life 
which, if his profession of Christianity be gen- 
uine, is at least in partial measure making him, 
and bids it master the crisis of the hour. The 
Christian man, if he would realise his own best 
possibilities and so save himself from blame, if 
he would understand conscience and obey it, 
must ceaselessly (and this not only in thought, 
but in practice) relate the ideals to the ideal. 



V 



CHRISTIAN DISTINCTIVENESS 
T our present point of view we are prepared 



to understand that, on its practical side, the 
Christian life will possess a special distinction of 
its own ; and we are prepared to understand, also, 
why this must be so. The fact has already been 
insisted on;^ and it has been stated that, even 
though the Christian system removes the main 
emphasis of thought from questions of conduct, 
or looks forward to such removal as the final 
thing, it is not because the Christian system holds 
conduct of small account. Christ was not going 
to have it supposed that the new preaching meant 
any lowering of the standard of practical life. It 
was, however, when we were looking at the ulti- 
mate Christian ethical ideal, and in connection 
therewith, that the point was previously made; 
and the special idea was that Christianity, while 
losing the moralist in the saint, stands for a 
higher standard of practice than the most rigid 
and stringent moralist could set up or reach. The 
idea immediately before us now is that the Chris- 




^ Chap. II. Sec. 2. 
106 



CHRISTIAN DISTINCTIVENESS 107 

tian, even at the lower stages of his Christian 
development, ought to manifest a loftier conduct 
than is manifested by others, and should stand out 
in the world with a superiority of practice known 
and read of all. 

The Christian ethical programme is, we have 
seen, that a veritable divine life, in part consti- 
tuting the Christian, is to manifest itself in, dic- 
tate to, and feed itself upon, the practical ques- 
tions which day by day arise. The Christian 
must, at the moment of crisis, allow the divine 
life within him to decide, and must, so far as is 
possible to him, withdraw all initiative of his 
own into the background, letting that divine life 
rise to fuller flood than it normally attains. He 
is to put himself by an effort which is only in 
measure an effort of imagination, and which, so 
far as it is that, is an imagination largely fulfilling 
itself into the position which he would occupy if 
the divine life made him wholly instead of only 
making him in part. But this — taking the moral 
and customary degree of the Christian's surren- 
der to the divine life, and adding thereto the 
greater power which in the hour of crisis the 
divine life will, through the Christian's newly- 
accentuated surrender, obtain — this means that 
the practical questions of the Christian's life, the 
practical lines whereupon he moves, are in large 
part governed at the direct initiative of God Him- 



108 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



self. The Christian should show a distinctive 
ethical product, for he is submitted to, and in 
part made by, a force which must surely bring 
about a distinctive ethical result. The divine 
life, working in the Christian, must surely do 
what no other force could hope to do. The 
Christian, if he be genuinely Christian, w^ill in the 
nature of things prove himself to be at advantage 
in regard to the ethical standard he attains.. As 
we remember that the Christian man is con- 
stituted by an altogether special life-force out of 
which all his ethical achievement should issue, 
we are on the one hand able to claim a special 
ethical possibility for the Christian man, and on 
the other hand obliged to warn him that, unless 
that special ethical possibility be at least in part 
fulfilled, he is not true to the name he bears. 

I 

In other words, if the doctrine of the Christian 
religion be true, there ought to be an altogether 
special quality in those who profess to hold it 
and to live by it; and the world has a right to 
look for something far above the average in those 
who claim to be its devotees. A profession of 
Christianity does not justify itself so long as the 
Christian is merely made and kept a good aver- 
age man by his professed faith. 

It is obvious that the larger the claims made by 



CHEISTIAN DISTINCTIVENESS 109 

anything — by any person or by any system of 
thought or religion — so much the larger must be 
the effects it produces, if the claim is to be al- 
lowed as valid. If any one claims simply to 
make some more or less helpful suggestions for 
the conduct of life — suggestions which, if car- 
ried out, will on the whole tend to elevate life 
and make it a sweeter thing, but suggestions 
which may admittedly fail in many cases and 
about which there is a certain amount of chance 
— well, in face of such a moderate claim we do 
not pitch our expectations too high, and he who 
makes the claim is not seriously discredited nor 
put to shame when nothing very much results. 
We say, " There was a certain margin of pos- 
sible failure allowed for; and the smallness of 
the result is not matter for surprise." But no 
such " extenuating circumstances " are available 
if a professed Christianity fails to produce a 
special ethical quality in those who profess it. 
For the claim to be a Christian is really a claim 
to be dominated by the force of the divine life. 
Christianity does not speak in halting tones about 
what it can do: it does not simply say that, if 
all the conditions be favourable, and the life 
which tries it be of the right sort, it may be able 
to do something for that life and to make some- 
thing out of it: it puts forward a claim that is 
universal in its reach. It declares itself to be 



110 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

both a necessity and a sufficiency, not for a per- 
centage of the race, but for all its members ; and 
it offers with confidence, not to patch up life in 
some degree, to give, as it were, crutches to the 
morally lame so that they shall be able to get on 
a little further, but to redeem life into a realisa- 
tion of its most exalted possibilities; and it pro- 
fesses to contain within itself, because its method 
of action is what it is, the answer to every ques- 
tion that can arise in the management of the 
most difficult problems of practical experience. 
And the Christian, in declaring himself a Chris- 
tian, declares himself submitted, at any rate 
partially submitted, to a power whereof all this 
can be truly said. Surely something special 
ought to come out of it all! This Hfe-force 
which Christianity claims to bring — ^this life- 
force to which Christ's disciples say they have 
yielded themselves — does this wholly exceptional 
force produce no wholly exceptional effect? Can 
such a special power, brought to bear upon Hfe, 
leave life unaltered in its main aspects and its 
^ main contents and its main issues? Or can such 
a special power, brought to bear upon life, do only 
what other powers could have done? One is 
shut up to the conclusion that there must be some- 
thing wrong, either with the claim of Christian- 
ity or with the Christian's submission to it, if 
the Christian type of life does not pass beyond the 



CHEISTIAN DISTmCTIVENESS 111 

moral average and reveal a quality all its own. 
For a veritable Christian distinctiveness we are 
surely entitled to call. 

It is in the light of this consideration that the 
Christian needs to test his own moral achieve- 
ment. If he be contentedly resting in the fact 
that he is not worse than the average, he has not 
realised what his responsibilities really are — the 
responsibilities laid upon him by his claim to be 
submitted to, made by, a divine Hfe which must 
surely, in the practical effects it produces, leave 
the moral average far behind. If he be not 
ceaselessly holding up before the eyes of men a 
product, a manufacture of practical material, so 
to say, which shows that some altogether special 
spiritual forces have been at work, the worth of 
his Christian profession can scarcely be ranked as 
high. One ought to feel, as one passes within 
the Christian boundaries, that here one is in com- 
pany with an altogether different make of man. 
If it be true, as is sometimes said, that the Chris- 
tian disciple, taken on the whole, is simply a 
fair average man, then the position is nothing less 
than a satire on his profession of faith in Chris- 
tianity and in Christ. 

II 

One needs to emphasise the further point that 
the distinctiveness of the Christian man is to be 



112 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

of a more than merely negative character. The 
pressure of the active divine Hfe within him, out 
of which, by the theory, all his outward doings 
are to come, must result in a real and positive 
moral achievement, not simply in the avoidance 
of what is wrong. It is not by carrying further 
than others his abstinence from evil, but by a 
real manufacture of something distinctively good, 
that the Christian man fulfils the requirements of 
the case. 

The point needs emphasising; for it is with 
the colourless life, the life about which there is 
nothing very particular to be said either in the 
way of good or of evil, that so many are apt to 
be content. The neutral life, the unpronounced 
life, the life which gets nowhere near the ex- 
tremes of either righteousness or sin, but keeps a 
middle course deserving hardly any word of com- 
mendation or of blame, is perhaps the life most 
ordinarily found even in the Christian ranks. 
Men are satisfied — not to say proud — if they can 
but declare that they have kept clear of flagrant 
and open transgression, if they can take up this 
commandment and say, " Yes, that has not been 
broken," and turn to the other and say, " As to 
that, there is no charge against us," and thus, as 
to the actual commission of what is wrong, can 
claim to be acquitted of all blame. There may 
have been no special moral richness revealed in 



CHRISTIAN DISTINCTIVENESS 113 

them, no very distinct revelation of holiness given 
in what they have said and done — but then there 
has not been, either, any special trace of positive 
sinfulness in the words they have uttered and the 
deeds they have wrought. They are content if 
upon the course of their existence the colours 
neither of good nor of evil are blazoned forth, 
if upon the whole of it they can preserve the one 
dull, neutral hue. And, indeed, such a life is 
always able to make out a good case for itself. 
The elder brother, standing beside the prodigal, 
and able to say with at any rate a large measure 
of truth, " I never transgressed a commandment 
of thine," appears entitled to feel something of 
satisfaction with his record. In a world where 
the enticements to wrong are spread out with an 
alluring fairness, where the prizes to be won by 
those who will turn aside from the path of out- 
ward rectitude are numerous and inviting, where 
forbidden practices and doubtful methods of liv- 
ing are tricked out with false beauties till the eye 
may be quickly deceived by their glamour — in 
such a world it is surely no small matter if we 
can proclaim ourselves to have no staring blots 
upon our robes ! It may not be the highest thing; 
but it is surely a great deal ! 

Yet, if the method of Christian ethics has been 
truly set forth, all this really means very little 
after all. If the Christian is really in any degree 



114 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

made out of, constituted by, a veritable divine 
life, it is a very positive, and not a simply nega- 
tive, virtue that he ought to show ; for the divine 
life must have larger possibilities within it than 
those of mere restraint. And, as a matter of 
fact, one has only to look for a moment at the 
world's reading of things so far as life in gen- 
eral is concerned, to realise that in investing ab- 
stinence from wrong with so great an importance, ' 
we are treating the moral side of our life differ- 
ently from all the rest. In all other things we 
recognise that only by positive progress and 
achievement does life become worthy; it is not 
when we can say that we have just kept clear 
of failure, but when we can claim to have over- 
come obstacles and won our way in their despite, 
that our voices have any proud ring of triumph 
in them; unworthy of our manhood should we 
think it if, day after day and year after year, 
we could but say that we have managed to scrape 
through. The rough wisdom of the world shows 
what it thinks of the man who is satisfied with 
mere avoidance of defeat when it declares that 
he who never makes a mistake will never make 
anything; and, although the saying may need to 
be somewhat qualified and toned down, it never- 
theless contains a truth not to be despised. At 
any rate, it is in striving and in pursuit and in 
beating back of oppositions and in victorious 



CHEISTIAN" DISTINCTIVENESS 115 

achievement of most positive order that worthy 
living consists; and in everything else than the 
moral sphere, we all acknowledge that the case 
is so. It is by the amount of forward movement 
he can show us that we rank a man : it is as we 
can see that he forgot the things behind and 
pressed on to things before that we count him 
deserving of exalted place in the scale of man- 
hood; and in all things it is by its eagerness and 
its upward straining and its determination to 
advance that human life wins aught of praise. 

Is manhood, with a veritable divine life in- 
fused into it and in part recreating it, to be less 
forceful, less positive, than unassisted manhood 
feels constrained to be? In the sphere of practi- 
cal life the transformed manhood of the Christian 
must, in all reasonableness, produce a result 
possessing a positive distinctiveness of its own. 
How can he be meanly satisfied if he does noth- 
ing that is particularly worthy of blame? Is 
this all that the pressure and operation of a di- 
vine life can do ? Has that divine life no stronger 
initiative, no more forceful push? The effect 
bears no proportion to the cause, is utterly in- 
adequate thereto. By his very profession of sub- 
mission to the Christ-force, by his very claiming 
of the Christian name, the Christian takes upon 
himself the responsibility of positive production 
in the moral sense, inasmuch as such a positive 



116 THE CHEISTIA^T METHOD OF ETHICS 

production must inevitably result from any work- 
ing of the force to which he yields. It is, indeed, 
only by an imperfection of submission, or by 
actual resistance — an imperfection and a resist- 
ance rendered more culpable by the partial ac- 
knowledgment made — that the Christian remains 
at the purely negative stage; and it is not too 
much to say that his very contentment with the 
absence of outward sinfulness is itself a sin. The 
blame of unresponsiveness falls with heavier 
weight upon those who profess to have responded 
in part. They have, so to say, given their case 
away. The Christian, if he have any title to the 
name, is in measure constituted out of the life 
of God, coming to him through his fellowship 
with Christ ; and because that life cannot be con- 
ceived as any other than a forceful, initiating 
power, ceaselessly making its own special moral 
products and launching them upon the world 
through the channel of the human personalities 
it rules, the Christian life must ever manifest a 
positive distinctiveness of good. It is only in the 
nature of things that, if a professed Christianity 
be real, such a manifestation should be made; 
and the demand for it is but a demand that the 
Christian shall let the divine life in him work it- 
self out and have its unhindered way. 



CHEISTIAN DISTINCTIVENESS 117 



III 

Let it be remembered, also, that the Christian 
distinctiveness with which we are just now con- 
cerned is a distinctiveness of a practical kind. 
This is the counterbalancing truth to the truth 
previously insisted on^ — the truth that in the con- 
struction of its ethical system Christianity be- 
gins by taking the emphasis away from conduct 
and setting it elsewhere. That is of primary im- 
portance; and yet Christianity only does that in 
order to find a means of elevating conduct to 
far higher levels. The very process of removing 
the primary interest from conduct, if the process 
be rightly carried through, results in a trans- 
formation of life on its practical side. It is for 
a practical distinctiveness in the Christian that 
we are entitled to look. One of the test ques- 
tions is this, " How, in regard to the practical 
virtues — those practical virtues which some peo- 
ple, absorbed in religious enthusiasms and reli- 
gious contemplations and those things which they 
dignify with the name of their inner religious 
experiences, are sometimes apt to forget all about 
— how, in regard to practical virtues, does Chris- 
tianity work itself out in our case ? " It is quite 
true that the Christian religion applies itself first 
of all, not to man's outward conduct, but to man's 
heart. It is quite true that it aims at transform- 
^ Chap. II. Sec. i. 



118 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

ing outward conduct, not directly, but by trans- 
forming inward character first. But it is also true 
that inward character cannot be transformed 
without issuing in a transformation of outward 
conduct, and in an excellence of practice beyond 
what was known before. And Christ Himself, 
in putting aside as touched with something of 
absurdity the idea that those who called them- 
selves His disciples should do no more than 
others,^ showed that it was thus He read the case. 

The Sermon on the Mount, indeed, stands 
forth as supplying a tangible test whereby to 
some extent the practical achievements of the 
Christian man may be gauged. It is possible, of 
course, to take the Sermon on the Mount as the 
whole of Christianity — which it is not — and in- 
sistence on its ethical precepts to fall into the 
very error against which Christ was always 
warning His hearers, the error of fixing all inter- 
est and anxiety upon externals alone. Not that 
even the Sermon on the Mount does not call for 
much more than an outward righteousness; but 
ethics, as distinct from religion, bulks so largely 
in its contents that thought is apt to fasten upon 
the ethics and to forget the rest. The danger of 
falling into the indicated error is, however, 
avoided if we take a proper grasp upon the cir- 
cumstances under which the discourse was 
iMatt. V. 47. 



CHRISTIAN DlSTmCTiVENESS 119 

preached. Probably the customary idea that it 
was dehvered to a promiscuous crowd can scarcely 
be maintained ; and the idea seems, indeed, to be 
negatived by the words in which the evangelist 
tells the tale. "And seeing the multitudes, he 
went up into the mountain " — with the purpose, 
clearly, of getting away from the multitudes — 
" and when he had sat down, his disciples came 
unto him: and he opened his mouth and taught 
them " — taught them, not the multitudes. It was 
to those who were actually in some measure 
disciples of Christ that the discourse was ad- 
dressed. This does not mean that only the little 
band of men whom we call the Apostles heard 
Christ's words, but that He spoke to those who 
had passed beyond the stage of mere curiosity 
about Him, and who, however dimly and imper- 
fectly, were really attaching themselves in some 
sort of personal relationship to Him. The dis- 
course recorded in the sixth chapter of Luke — 
a discourse which on the surface bears the re- 
semblance to a part of this — is probably a dif- 
ferent one, addressed to the crowd as a whole. 
It is not so profound, not so spiritual, if the 
phrase may be employed, as the one that Matthew 
sets down. Some degree of true discipleship is 
pre-supposed in those to whom these words are 
given. And if this be borne in mind, there is no 
danger that even the closest student of the Ser- 



120 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS \ 

mon on the Mount will take Christ simply as a 

great moral Teacher, and nothing more. This \ 
ethical instruction which Christ was giving does 

but show how, on the practical side, discipleship | 

is to work itself out. A real surrender to Christ, j 

made in the way which in other sayings He pre- ] 

scribes, is pre-supposed before the ethical teach- | 

ing begins. 1 

But this said, we may repeat that the Sermon j 

on the Mount stands forth as supplying a tan- | 

gible test for the ethical achievement of the Chris- | 

tian man, and as affording indisputable proof that | 

it is in practical virtue Christian distinctiveness ' 
ought to be shown. It is always useful to have a 
clearly marked standard to which we can refer : to 

estimate ourselves against a definite test scatters ! 

our delusions and breaks up our self-conceit and j 

drives us to note flaws to which we have hitherto j 

shut our eyes; and while it is undoubtedly \ 

possible to go through an ethical stock-taking too i 

often, it is possible, also, not to go through it i 

often enough. The Sermon on the Mount sets ] 

the standard, supplies the test, enables us to take j 

stock of our moral properties. The Christian j 

man must sometimes, if the apparent paradox \ 

may be pardoned, come back to the contemplation ] 

of his own external practice, and to a testing of it, ■ 

in order to see whether he has in the first instance : 

removed his care from his own external practice i 



CHRISTIAN DISTINCTIVENESS 121 



in the right way. And, though the Sermon on the 
Mount does not cover all the ground of life — 
although, indeed, it is not by any self-conforming, 
either to the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount 
or to any others, that life is to be rightly ordered 
— yet the Christian may find therein the test 
whereby the spiritual processes he claims to have 
gone through can be judged. It is in a practical 
distinctiveness such as that discourse inculcates 
that a true Christianity must issue in the end. 
That practical distinctiveness is not the thing 
which the Christian sets himself directly to 
achieve — yet, if he be a Christian indeed, it cannot 
fail to emerge. 

We are not concerned, in thus calling for a 
distinctiveness of Christian practice, with the 
controversy as to whether New Testament con- 
ceptions of virtue and duty are superior to all 
others the world has seen. However that ques- 
tion may be decided for each individual investi- 
gator's mind, it may for our present purpose be 
left on one side. They dispute sometimes whether 
Christianity brought in any originality of moral 
ideals — whether it revealed any new virtues, 
established any new conception of practical good- 
ness before the eyes of men. An open-minded 
reader will most likely conclude as a matter of 
fact, that Christ at any rate claimed to have set 
up new standards of goodness, since He so em- 



122 THE CHRISTIAN' METHOD OF ETHICS 



phatically contrasted His own " But I say unto 
you " with what had been said by the men of the 
older time. But, putting it as strongly as pos- 
sible the other way, the call for Christian dis- 
tinctiveness still rings clear. We may admit that, 
quite apart from religion and Christianity, there 
is a steady progress in the moral ideals of men, 
and that it is impossible to set any limits to its 
advance. But this remains — and it is on this that 
the call for a practical distinctiveness in the Chris- 
tian is based — that Christ brought his disciples 
a power which will enable them to make fuller 
practice of the old good, and that He expects 
them to use the power He brings. Without Christ, 
men may know a great deal about love and gen- 
erosity and all the rest : with Christ, they are to be 
carried far and far on into the practice of these 
things, finding in Him and drawing from Him 
that which enables them to do more than others 
have done. We come back again to the point 
that a divine life, manifesting itself through the 
Christian, must accomplish more than any other 
power can do. In regard to the practical virtues 
must the Christian disciple have something extra 
to show. The Christian disciple must be actually 
and measurably more kind, and more loving, and 
more forgiving, and more generous, and more 
truthful, and more morally courageous, and more 
all else that could be put into a catalogue of the 



CHEISTIAN DISTINCTIVENESS 123 

graces than others are; for he is submitted, ac- 
cording to his profession, to a force which must 
assuredly make him so. 

IV 

Yet, to complete the thought, it must be added 
that it is on the common field, primarily and in 
the first instance, that this Christian distinctive- 
ness is to be shown. Here, again, we base our- 
selves upon the underlying conception of Chris- 
tian activity as issuing out of a veritable divine 
life; and we are entitled to declare that a divine 
life will find in the ordinary spheres and in the 
common relations of life ample scope for mani- 
festing how special and unique a force it is. The 
very highest quality of Christian distinctiveness 
may be revealed without travelling out of the 
beaten tracks along which the mass of men wend 
their way. And when it is said that the Christian 
is to be marked off from others by a practical dis- 
tinctiveness of his own, it is not so much meant 
that he is to take up a special programme as that 
he is to perform the old tasks in special ways and 
with special grace. 

The average man (the average religious man 
included) would appear to cherish the idea that 
Christian distinctiveness — what is commonly 
termed saintliness — ^is, and must ever be, a thing 
entirely divorced from common experience. The 



124 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

very word suggests something wholly out of 
relation with the ordinary life of every day. The 
ordinary man may be religious, but a saint he 
cannot be: it is as though there were considered 
to be two brands of religion — a superior, to be 
manifested by certain elect souls alone, and an 
inferior, with which the crowds must be content : 
saints there have been and may still be, but they 
can hardly be looked for in the workshop or on 
the mart. And what lies beneath this idea is a 
feeling that Christian distinctiveness, if it be 
present, must prove and manifest itself through 
a special set of exercises which ordinary men find 
no opportunity of performing — that saintliness is, 
as it were, a separate profession or occupation in 
which ordinary men have no time to engage. 
They who would be spiritually distinguished, who 
would reveal the loftiest type of Christian activity, 
must forsake life's usual route and strike out for 
themselves a line far from the common paths. 
The feeling shows itself in many ways. The 
asceticism of the older centuries — the occasional 
recrudescence to-day of fevered denunciations of 
wealth and position as being things which must 
necessarily be sacrificed if spiritual ideals are to 
have their way — the demand, sometimes heard, 
that they who would be perfect must reduce their 
connections with the external world to a mini- 
mum, and put as great a distance between them- 



CHRISTIAN DISTmCTIVENESS 125 

selves and the common life as may be — are all 
signs of the idea that the highest character must 
manifest itself, not upon the usual stages of 
activity, but by distinct operations of its own. 

Against mistaken ideas such as these, it needs 
to be declared that the essential proof and exercise 
of Christian distinctiveness consists, not in doing 
new things, but in doing the old things, the com- 
mon things, in a spirit and fashion uncommon 
and new. And if at the first blush this appear a 
somewhat attenuated programme, unworthy of 
the dignity of sainthood, the true greatness of it 
— the reality of the change it implies for the whole 
of life — becomes clear with a little thought. It is 
a matter of common knowledge that two men may 
do each the same thing, and yet do it in ways 
totally different, so that under the manipulation 
of the finer mind the old thing becomes new. An 
ordinary routine may be, in a hundred subtle 
ways, lifted into something of greatness and 
touched with something of beauty, when it is 
taken in hand by a man of special quality. He 
may do nothing fresh, and yet the whole thing 
will take on a fresh colour and aspect from what 
he is. One man goes through the common pro- 
gramme as being common himself, as if at home 
with commonness : another, possessing some sub- 
tle quality within, makes the common programme 
great. Words convey a different shade of mean- 



126 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

ing on different voices : the same movement wears 
a varying significance according to the spirit that 
prompts it. It is quite possible for two lives, twin 
in all external things, to be worlds and worlds 
apart. And true Christian distinctiveness affords 
a more marked example of the same principle. 
The higher degrees of Christian attainment will 
find ample scope to reveal their presence and to 
exert their influence, even though the hands be 
kept to their old line of activity, and the feet stay 
in the old ways, and the voice speak on the old 
topics still. The divine life, constituting the 
Christian man, will necessarily mix some fresh 
ingredient of grace into that which grace had 
left almost uncoloured before. Even when no 
special opportunity comes in sight, and the 
worker has but his ordinary materials and his 
ordinary tools, it will, by some magic of its own, 
impart a touch of the special to that which has 
nothing special in itself. The man of Christian 
distinctiveness needs to be no exile from the 
homelands of ordinary men : he moves among his 
fellows with open eyes and ready steps, sharing 
their interests and one with them in many a word 
and deed ; and yet, because he carries within him 
something that is peculiarly his, he makes old 
things new. True Christian distinctiveness is 
not something to take the place of common life, 
but something that is to dart through, and to 



CHEISTIAN DISTmCTIVENESS 127 

make incandescence upon, the common life, as 
the electric current darts through, and makes in- 
candescence upon, the wire. 

In one way, perhaps the demand for a special 
quality manifested upon the old levels is a harder 
demand to meet than one for an altogether ex- 
ceptional service would be. We are always far 
readier to undertake some special enterprise than 
to carry special quality into the old enterprises 
and bend it to the carrying out of the old call. 
The Christian disciple must bow himself to the 
demand, none the less. If the divine life be 
making him, it is to find room upon the old stage. 
He will not need to break away upon a fresh line 
in order that the new impulses governing him 
shall show clear. This is a case, it may be said, 
in which it is right to put the new wine into the 
old bottles. And each one must make the applica- 
tion for himself. Citizen, business man, poli- 
tician — whatever any one may be — to show the 
excellence of discipleship, its distinctive quality, 
does not mean that these lines of life and activity 
need be left, or even in smallest degree slightingly 
esteemed, but that they are to be taken as the 
field, the platform, the sphere, in which the Chris- 
tian, re-constituted as he claims to be by a life 
not his own, is to show how he can out-distance 
all the rest. And one could not, in all reason- 
ableness, wish for a nobler mission than to reveal 



138 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

— on the old stage where so many work without 
the propulsion of that inward life-force which 
we say is making us — what a Christ-inspired 
heart and a Christ-taught head and a Christ- 
directed hand can do. Through being possessed 
and made by a divine life, the Christian will show 
a distinctiveness clear to the gaze of all ; but it is 
his first business to show it by taking the uncom- 
mon quality back into the world's common ways. 



VI 



THE CHRISTIAN'S RELATION TO 
THE WORLD 

CO far, it is with general principles that we 
^ have dealt. Or, we may say that it is with 
the underlying motive power of Christian ethics, 
with the inner condition and movement and im- 
pulse out of which Christian ethics ought to be 
born, that we have been concerned. But amid 
the ordinary practical problems of life the Chris- 
tian man will find that some further word of 
counsel is needed, in order that he may be fully 
equipped. And what remains to be said concern- 
ing the Christian ethical method can best be said 
in connection with some of those ethical problems 
which confront the Christian at almost every hour 
of every day. We may deal simultaneously (for 
a reason which will immediately become clear) 
with the question as to how the general princi- 
ples already enunciated would work out in prac- 
tice, and the other question as to how the Chris- 
tian man, in the absence of their perfect working 
out, is to order his ways. For the two answers 
are really one. We pass now, therefore, to a 

129 



130 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

more direct consideration of some of the spheres 
wherein the general ethical principles of Chris- 
tianity have to be applied, some of the particular 
practical departments in which questions of Chris- 
tian conduct are likely to arise. 

The necessity for doing this arises from the 
fact, which has been repeatedly stated or implied, 
that the Christian man must in the last resort 
attack ethical problems, at any rate in measure, 
for himself. Theoretically, the Christian ethical 
system looks to an automatic settlement of prac- 
tical matters through the government of the di- 
vine life within the Christian man ; and the Chris- 
tian man, at each emergence of the ethical crisis, 
has first of all to set himself in sUch an inward at- 
titude that the divine life within him shall win 
increase of power, and take at any rate a large 
part in the settlement reached — the Christian con- 
science bearing witness whether or no this is done. 
It was previously said that something more than 
the idea of the spiritual development in which 
the Christian is engaged is to come into play as 
each practical crisis arrives : it is the fact of it — 
the developing divine life itself — that is to rule 
and decide. But the process of self-immersion in 
the divine life, carried to its utmost possible point 
at any critical hour, is not complete, and leaves 
still something for man to do. Since, abandoning 
himself as he can do by the sway of those im- 



CHEISTIAN'S EELATION TO WOELD 131 



pulses which are not his own, but God's, the 
Christian man nevertheless retains something of 
his ethical affairs in his own hands (in despite, 
as it were, of his own better will) he has to ask 
how, in any given case, this remnant of self- 
activity is to be ruled. The primary answer, of 
course, is, in view of all that has been previously 
said, that he must act as the divine life within him 
would act if it had all its rights. As was said in 
a previous chapter, the Christian, in so far as he 
judges ethical questions, judges them rightly by 
remembering that he ought not to judge. Prop- 
erly speaking, ethical questions are to be solved by 
permitting the divine Personality, with which the 
Christian seeks perfect union, to attack them, 
rather than by any attack of his own: yet too 
large a margin of his own personality, so to say, 
remains outside the surrender at present accom- 
plished, for this to be a true account of what is 
done. Obviously, therefore, that part of the 
Christian's own activity which remains working 
on its own account comes most nearly into line 
with the general ideal by regulating itself accord- 
ing to what the divine life would do (so far as 
this is ascertainable) if it had things to itself. 
The idea of spiritual development must be called 
on after all, since the spiritual development itself 
has not absorbed all regulative and directive 
power. Hence it is that the two questions pre- 



133 THE CHKISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

viously referred to — ^the question as to how the 
general principles of the preceding chapters would 
work out in practice, and the other question as to 
how the Christian, failing their perfect working 
out, is to order his ways — really come to be one. 
And it must be remembered all through that the 
idea of the divine life is capable of exercising 
a right regulative power only when the fact of 
it is at any rate in measure a real and present 
thing. The Christian man has to remember that, 
according to the proper ordering of things, the 
divine life in him is to manifest itself through, 
dictate to, and feed itself upon, the activities of 
every hour; and in his own ordering of things, so 
far as any remains to him, he must act as if this, 
and only this, were being done. It is as a question 
of spiritual biology that every ethical question 
will come before his mind. 

But this primary answer, thus given, at once 
raises a further inquiry. How, in the different 
departments of life, will this principle work out? 
The Christian man may legitimately ask to have 
the indicated method shown to him worked out in 
at least one or two examples, so that he may in 
other cases have some guide as to its use. We 
begin with the question of the Christian's relation 
to the world. 



CHKISTIAN'S KELATION TO WOKLD 133 



I 

(A) The Christian and Material Good 

The first aspect under which, the question 
presents itself regards the Christian's attitude to 
material interests and to material gain. How is 
the Christian man to bear himself so far as con- 
cerns matters of acquisition, increase of riches, 
and all the other things that come under the head 
of material good ? Obviously, it must be recog- 
nised that there is a certain inconsistency, even a 
certain antagonism, between interests of a spir- 
itual and interests of a material order. This is 
of course a commonplace; and theoretically the 
recognition has always been made. But it may 
be claimed that for the Christian who seeks to 
live by the formula enunciated — the formula that 
the divine life in him is to manifest itself through, 
dictate to, and feed itself upon, all the activities 
of every hour — and who makes that formula 
regulative of his ethical programmes, all the ac- 
cepted precepts concerning his relations with the 
material world will stand upon a different and a 
definite basis. They will no longer be arbitrary 
enactments: they will not even be enactments in 
justification of whose promulgation certain more 
or less vague considerations of spiritual ad- 
vantage may be pleaded : they will be realised as 



134 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

organically bound up with, as actually involved 
and implied in, the spiritual process which consti- 
tutes the Christian's life. They will be discerned 
as being, for the Christian man, inherent in the 
very nature of things, and will justify themselves 
so. The ideals will be related to the ideal. The 
Christian man, ordering himself in the suggested 
Way, may in many cases (not only in the matter 
now in hand, but in many other matters) arrive 
ultimately at the same conclusion regarding duty 
as does the man who sets up some different stand- 
ard — yet for the former the whole thing will be 
rationalised, unified, and in consequence the entire 
spirit of it changed. The commonplace that be- 
tween the spiritual and the material a certain an- 
tagonism exists becomes more luminous, because 
more inevitable, for him who realises that the di- 
vine life within him ought to manifest itself 
through, dictate to, and feed itself upon, all his 
relations with the material world. 

For it is only by strict subordination of the 
material that the process indicated in the formula 
can be maintained ; and every one who has stud- 
ied human nature, whether in himself or in others, 
will admit that between the lower and the higher 
there must always be war. The divine life in 
man, so far as it has been present, has always 
recognised this as a primary and undeniable fact. 
It stands out clear in the story of man's experi- 



CHEISTIAN'S EELATION TO WOELD 135 :| 

ence that for the loftiest spiritual results — in ; 

order that the divine life may first of all express j 

itself, and then develop itself, in ceaseless rhythm | 

— there must be a turning away as v^ell as a turn- \ 

ing to, a choosing which repudiates the lower as j 

well as allows the higher to have a voice. Quite i 

apart from the rightness or wrongness of any par- | 

ticular contact with any particular material in- 1 

terest, the Christian has to realise that the life 1 

within flourishes as the life connected with the I 

material declines. The matter is not summed up I 

for him even in the statement that interest in the j 

material draws away interest from the spiritual. ] 

This ethical question of the Christian's attitude | 
to the material becomes (as, indeed, do all ethical 

questions when treated on the indicated lines) a 1 

question of spiritual biology, to use the phrase j 

previously employed. The Christian man has to I 

reckon with the fact that the spirituality he pos- \ 

sesses will not manifest itself, that fuller spir- I 

itualify does not come within the prospect, ex- j 

cept by conscious and deliberate discrimination I 

between the interests of the outward life and the ! 
interests of the life within, and a conscious de- 
termination to make the interests of the life 

within supreme. The divine life within, did it | 

have the entire control of the life without in its \ 

own charge, would make the discrimination. That j 

we know. The Christian man, therefore, must | 

i 



I 



136 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS ) 

make it for himself. He must realise how in the , 

nature of things there is, between the inner and ; 

the outer, a great gulf fixed. And it is only as j 
he realises this that the outer and material world 
subserves his spiritual welfare — that world's very 

irreconcilability, once accepted, making spiritual \ 

development more alert and intense. It is by ' 

making its relations with material interests to a i 

great extent hostile, or at any rate by tinging ' 

them with aloofness, that the divine life in the ; 
Christian makes those relations assist its growth. 

It is from this standpoint that we see the force i 

of many of the utterances wherein Christ touches * 

upon the relations between the spiritual welfare | 

and the material welfare of man. For instance, | 

the saying, " He that findeth his life shall lose it," \ 

obtains added significance when we set it side by j 

side with the idea that the divine life within the \ 

Christian man is both to show itself in, and to \ 

develop itself through, the Christian's relation | 

with the material world. The saying is perceived, j 

indeed, to hold the same idea in other form. The ■ 

Christian's ethical formula, as we have set it ; 

down, looks to a constant spiritual becoming, j 

whereto all other things must be subordinate. ] 

The quoted utterance of Christ looks the same . 

way. We are not to ^ind our life. What is the ji 

meaning of the rather curious and unusual ; 
phrase? It means this — that to get our life out 

! 

! 
I 



CHEISTIAN'S EELATION TO WORLD 137 

of the things which we find nearest to us and 
ready to our hand is to act upon a mistaken con- 
ception of life, and that life is lived rightly and 
wisely only when it is concerned with the making 
and developing of the soul within us. This is 
the contrast — on the one hand, the life which 
simply finds the world and all the things of the 
world lying round about it, and which does the 
best it can with these and gets the most it can out 
of these; and on the other hand, the life which 
strives and yearns and prays for a far-off great- 
ness of soul, bends itself upon becoming some- 
thing that it is not. One man settles down, so 
to say, among the ready-made things : here are all 
these material realities round about him — and he 
has found his life. It is all there ; and all he has 
to do is to gather to himself as much as may be 
in his power to gather out of what he has found. 
Another man looks further and higher — feels 
that life is not found yet — that he is only begin- 
ning to be — that this present is to the larger fu- 
ture only as the bud is to the flower — that it doth 
not yet appear what he shall be; and he concen- 
trates himself through all he can do of earnest 
effort and aspiration and prayer to produce, or 
to have produced, within him the life, the spiritual 
substance as it were, the soul enriched and great- 
ened, which as yet are not there. And necessarily, 
it is among those who do not find their life, but 



138 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



who are still looking for it, that he will take 
his place who realises how the divine life in him 
is to manifest itself through, dictate to, and feed 
itself upon, all his relations with the world. 

In all Christ's utterances upon the topic, as in 
this, it is the idea of a spiritual becoming that He 
takes as regulative of the disciple's dispositions 
toward material good. Because, for the Christian, 
all his relations with the material things of the 
world are to be at the same time a revelation and 
a development of the divine life within, the sense 
of difference between the material and the spir- 
itual interests of life, the sense that they are in 
great measure opposed, must be kept ever living 
in the Christian's heart and mind. It was on the 
existence of a progressive divine life within that 
Christ Himself grounded His doctrine concerning 
the attitude of the Christian man to material 
things: it is on the same foundation that the 
Christian must ground his attitude to material 
things to-day. 

II 

On the other hand, the recognition of antagon- 
ism between spiritual and material interests must 
not be pushed too far — must not be pushed to the 
point of holding all material good as worthy of 
nothing but contempt and scorn. The very for- 
mula which we are taking as regulative of Chris- 



CHRISTIAN'S RELATION TO WORLD 139 

tian ethics forbids; for it is a positive ministry 
which, by the formula, the developing divine life 
v^ithin the Christian man is to obtain from all 
things ; and if the divine life in the Christian man 
were finding in all things a source of self-increase, 
it would necessarily preserve some sort of positive 
contact even with those things against which it 
needs to be on its guard, if only for the sake of 
the struggle against them and the spiritual vic- 
tory in which the struggle should result. So, to 
put it another way, the very hostility of material 
things becomes a ministry of spiritual good to 
the Christian man only as he conquers them, not 
by avoiding them and dismissing them so far as 
possible from his life, but by keeping them in 
their rightful place and forcing them to their 
rightful use. 

The Christian contention is not that material 
success or material comfort is wrong in itself. 
The curious fanaticism which every now and then 
rises up, holding it a sin to bestow any attention 
upon the material side of life, despising all mate- 
rial good as being unworthy of the thought of 
those who have heard the Christian call, is really 
as unchristian after its fashion as excessive at- 
tention to lower requirements is in another way. 
The legitimate doctrine — the doctrine which nat- 
urally emerges when we make the ethical ques- 
tion, as previously said, a question of spiritual 



140 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



biology — is simply that life's interests must be 
rightly ranked, and that in a true ranking of life's 
interests material cares drop into wholly sub- 
ordinate place. It is by the struggle to keep mate- 
rial interests where they ought to be that the 
inner life strengthens itself; and the struggle, 
with the spiritual benefit it may bring, can only be 
carried on when material interests are permitted 
at least standing-room. That they will ceaselessly 
press for more, is true; but it is precisely by the 
Christian's discipline and restraint of them that 
he makes them serve the highest interests of all. 
It is by the wrestle with them that the soul grows. 

What needs to be realised, for the purposes of 
a sound Christian ethical scheme, is that sacrifice 
has no value except as a means to a positive spir- 
itual advance. Intrinsically, it is vanity. Every 
now and again the Christian Church is swept 
by a tide of emotion which carries it into an 
advocacy of sacrifice for its own sake, and into 
a passionate declaration that any partaking in 
the material good of life beyond the merest neces- 
sities of the body's sustenance is something actu- 
ally approaching to a sin. The great thing, it is 
then contended, is to reduce life, on that side of 
it, to its lowest terms. Occasionally the thing is 
carried further still, and hardship is not only 
looked on as an experience to be endured with 
patience when God is pleased to send it, but as an 



CHEISTIAN-'S EELATION TO WORLD 141 

experience which is to be actually sought after 
and is in itself a sign of grace. Satisfaction of 
human instinct in any form is held to be at least 
a weakness, if not something worse. A wave of 
something which one hardly likes to call senti- 
mentalism, although it is to be feared that in 
many cases it is not much more, sweeps periodi- 
cally over the Church, bearing it into a convic- 
tion that the sum and substance of Christian 
ethics consists in the giving up what has been 
held dear. Both the ancient and the modern 
worlds have seen this spirit in their midst — the 
spirit which supposes that the voluntary embrac- 
ing of deprivation and loss, the actual going forth 
to seek them, must be the loftiest virtue the Chris- 
tian soul can show. 

The thing may easily become a delusion and a 
snare. In so far as the advent of this spirit is 
a sign of an awakened conscience, of a realisation 
on the part of the Church that material things 
have bulked too largely in its thought, it is to be 
welcomed ; but it must be remembered that Chris- 
tian ethics, as we are dealing with it, is a positive, 
not merely a negative thing, and is to have a very 
decided reaction on life. One may be self-sacri- 
ficing in act without having the haughtiness of 
the spirit or the pride of the heart in any wise 
brought down — that is, it is not necessarily the 
divine Hfe within that is manifesting itself in and 



142 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



developing itself through an outwardly self-sacri- 
ficing act; and the Christian, even while he per- 
forms the sacrifice, may not be securing any ac- 
tion or reaction between the outward conduct and 
the inward condition. The enrichment of the 
heart may not follow from the impoverishment 
and emptying of the hand. In the passage where- 
of we spoke before, Christ Himself demands the 
losing of life, it is true — ^but only for His sake. 
There must be a positive spiritual reaction and 
result, else the losing is of no avail. And this is 
too often forgotten. It is, indeed, strange to see 
how those who would denounce as pernicious 
error any doctrine of penances, in its Roman 
Catholic shape, have returned to that same doc- 
trine in varied form, and have invested with 
spiritual efficacy and spiritual worth an external 
act which may be not at all an index to the hidden 
soul. It is not by despising and spurning the 
material gain which may be put into our hands, 
any more than by sweeping avariciously into our 
hands all material gain we can, that we shall best 
cultivate the soul. And it is by making the culti- 
vation of the soul, the development of the divine 
life within it, the paramount consideration, that 
the Christian man must endeavour to see his way 
amid the tangle of material interests through 
which his path winds on. It is, let it be repeated, 
as a question of spiritual biology that the ethical 



CHEISTIAN'S EELATION TO WORLD 143 

question must be faced. And treating it thus, 
we reach the conclusion that the positive spiritual 
ministry of material interests is secured, not when 
material interests are thrust aside (only a nega- 
tive ministry is in that way obtained) but when 
they are yielded precisely their just place, and 
when all their pretension to more important place 
is rigidly denied. 

Ill 

What it really comes to is that the Christian 
man is to maintain an attitude of independence 
and detachment towards material circumstances, 
so far as the essence of his life is concerned. He 
is to touch and use them when they present them- 
selves, yet is not to let the ever-varying counte- 
nance wherewith they look upon him affect him at 
the centres of his being. It is not care for them, 
it is not scorn for them, but indifference toward 
them — the indifference which does not heed how 
they may shape themselves, since it is not what 
they intrinsically are, but the spiritual purpose 
whereto contact with them may be turned, that 
constitutes the important thing — it is this indiffer- 
ence toward them that the Christian man is to 
feel. For this is the attitude toward material 
things which the divine life within, did it hold 
perfect sway, would preserve; and the Christian 
man, in the making of his ethical adjustments, is 



14^ THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



to set himself where and how the divine life 
within would set him if he were but a. passive 
instrument in its hands. He is to live detached 
from trouble about external things, so that he 
may be free to give himself to the things that 
are higher. He is simply to let them be and to 
compel them to let him be, so that in that spirit 
and atmosphere of contented indifference the soul 
may grow. He is to be so established in the 
spiritual realm that he can let things come and 
go as they will, remaining unshaken from his rock 
of peace and content whatever the moment's visi- 
tation and condition may be. He is to look as if 
from afar upon all that takes place in the material 
environment girding him round. It is to appear 
to him as though the material life were hardly 
related to the essential spirit in him at all, 
not that he despises it, but that it almost appears 
to be living itself out in another world with which 
he has little concern. He is to let the lower 
processes of living go on, he being content to 
know nor gain nor loss, but holding himself free 
to concentrate upon the best. 

If it be said that the counsel is hard, inasmuch 
as this spirit is the most difficult of all to cultivate, 
the answer is clear. In the Christian man, the 
wish to set himself as God's life within would 
set him if it had all its will, has a dynamic force 
that makes for its own fulfilment ; for it does but 



CHEISTIAN'S EELATION TO WOKLD 145 

look toward the continuation and completion of 
a process already begun. It has been previously 
stated that the idea of a divine life within is 
capable of a right regulative power only when 
the fact of it is at any rate in part a real and 
present thing. But if that condition be fulfilled, 
the idea obtains a dynamic and self-realising 
strength. So the desire for this spirit of con- 
tented indifference tends unfailingly to fulfil 
itself. Whoso wants to find the world and the 
world's dealings with him unimportant will 
surely do so. Whoso yearns to free himself 
from too close earthly relationships in order that 
he may find his true life in the interests of the 
soul, will by his very yearning find a curtain 
drawn between the world and him so that he will 
scarce see the earthly vision nor feel the earthly 
touch nor know whether it be poverty or riches 
the world assigns him for his lot. For as to look 
upon the sun makes the eye powerless to distin- 
guish down upon the levels of earth so long as 
the influence of the glory persists, so does the 
gaze fixed upon the spiritual blot out all the rest. 
" Let me be detached from the lower and conse- 
crated to the higher — indifferent to the material 
through being set upon that which is above — 
letting the outward life order itself as it may 
while the inward life engrosses me ! " That is to 
be the constant desire and the constant prayer — 



146 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



and the very uplifting of the prayer uplifts with 
it the soul into realms where the material is noth- 
ing and the spiritual is all in all. 

The sum of the Christian ethical counsel, so 
far as concerns the Christian's relation to material 
things, is therefore this. Recognise the material 
side of living, but keep the spiritual side in the 
exalted place — do not, as men are so apt to do, 
reverse the thing, merely recognising the spiritual, 
while holding the material supreme. The Chris- 
tian disciple, faithful in all his toiling for the 
bread that perisheth, receiving gladly whatever 
of success may result from his toil, will still turn 
his soul's master-passion on things that this world 
knows not of. For thus will it come to be ever 
truer for him and of him that the divine life 
within him manifests itself through and develops 
itself by all his relations with the outward and 
material world. 

IV 

(B) The Christian and the Secular 
World 

There is, however, a wider aspect of the general 
question — the aspect which regards, not so much 
the Christian's relation to his own material good, 
as his relation to the movement of the secular 
world as a whole. How is the Christian man to 



CHEISTIAN'S RELATION" TO WORLD 147 



bear himself toward that mass of interests, toward 
all those currents of activity, toward all those 
ideals and purposes, which prevail beyond the 
Christian boundaries? Is he to hold himself in 
any definite relation, or in no definite relation, 
to these? And if in any, what is that relation 
to be? 

We begin as we began in the consideration of 
the Christian and his relation to material good. 
As the Christian has to recognise that between 
the divine life within him and the material inter- 
ests of his life a certain antagonism exists, so 
must he recognise a similar antagonism between 
the divine life within him and the general move- 
ment of the world. The divine life itself, were 
it actually, as well as ideally, the sole power con- 
stituting the Christian man, would make the 
recognition. In so far as it is present, it always 
does so. And the Christian man, treating the 
ethical question as one of spiritual biology, as the 
unfettered divine life within him would treat it, 
must make the recognition, too. 

To be a Christian, then, in anything like the 
real and full significance of the word, necessitates 
the arming of ourselves against the spirit which 
is dominant in the world, and absolutely prevents 
us from keeping quite unruflfled and smooth and 
sweet our relations with those who have not 
obeyed the Christian call. If it seem a hard sa)^- 



148 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

ing, it has at any rate high authority to back it 
up : " Think not that I came to send peace on the 
earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. 
For I came to set a man at variance against his 
father, and the daughter against her mother 
. . . and a man's foes shall be they of his own 
household." No picture of idyllic peacefulness 
did Christ himself draw as He outlined the results 
which allegiance to Him would bring about. He 
foresaw, rather, how those who owned Him for 
their Lord would often be driven into an attitude 
of uncompromising opposition toward the general 
sentiment and ideal of the world in which they 
lived. He foresaw how the life whereof He was 
going to be the source in man must realise itself 
as antagonistic to life which flows from their 
sources. And this was no doctrine for an earlier 
age, a doctrine destined to have less and less of 
force as the ages went on, but a doctrine abid- 
ingly true for all time. No developments of civ- 
ilisation — no softening down of the superficial 
roughnesses of men's manners and modes of life 
— none of the advantages of intellect and culture 
and morality which are the world's boast and 
pride — alter, or ever will alter, the fundamental 
fact that life as the average sentiment of any par- 
ticular time conceives it and makes it is an en- 
tirely different thing from life as Christ conceives 
it and as Christ makes it, and that he who declares 



CHRISTIAN'S RELATION TO WORLD 149 



himself as accepting the Christian ideal ought to 
see in the common ideals which satisfy many 
around him a great deal from which he must hold 
aloof. This lies really in the nature of things. If 
the Christian method is to live for goodness and 
for God, allowing all the lower instincts only to 
pick up what crumbs of satisfaction their utter 
subordination to goodness and to God allows 
them to find (and it is thus, surely, that the divine 
life in man would declare its aims) — and if the 
conventional method is to live for self so far as 
one dares, giving to goodness and to God just so 
much title to interfere as one feels one must — 
is not that a contrast great as any contrast can 
be? Christianity is, indisputably, the adoption 
of a spirit of life which is diametrically opposed 
to all the tendencies the world follows and to all 
the influences the world puts forth. 

The true disciple, therefore, will need the sol- 
dier-spirit toward the world, since he moves amid 
influences and ideals which are his foes. He 
will, if he realises the necessities of the positon, 
be a man, made not wholly of pliability and com- 
placency and power to ingratiate himself, but of 
sterner stuff — of watchfulness, resolution, in a 
sense even hardness, seriousness, alert and armed 
manhood. Whoso is a Christian in truth will 
look with something of sternness out upon the 
world, will keep himself in posture of defence, 



150 THE CHEISTIAN" METHOD OF ETHICS 



remembering that all these spirits he discerns 
moving near are spirits which would harm him 
did he permit their approach. Only as he under- 
stands that he moves through this world as 
through an alien country, wherein vigilance must 
never be relaxed and arms must be ever ready, 
only so has he realised the responsibility he under- 
took together with the disciple's name. That be- 
tween the Christian ideal and the conventional 
ideal of the world there can be no compromise 
nor truce — that stern fact must the Christian man 
be prepared to face. He must be the watchful 
sentinel, lest he be assailed and overthrown by 
that world-spirit which is never far away. 

In one way, perhaps, it is hardly necessary to 
insist so strongly upon the point since it is an 
accepted commonplace (whatever may be its 
effect or lack of effect upon Christian conduct in 
general) that between the Christian spirit and 
the world-spirit there must be at least an armed 
neutrality, and frequently actual war. But what 
is aimed at here, as in the previous instance of 
the Christian's relation to material good, is to 
show how the fact of this antagonism is funda- 
mental and inevitable, if a system of Christian 
ethics be rightly grounded. We arrive, it is true, 
by the route we are taking, at the same idea as 
is reached by travellers over other routes. But 
we link the idea with the essential process of the 



CHRISTIAN'S RELATION TO WORLD 151 

Christian life, rationalise it by so doing, and 
give it a stronger hold. The Christian man is 
to order his ways as though the divine life 
were manifesting itself in and developing it- 
self through its relations with the outside world 
— and this means that the Christian must set him- 
self in that attitude of opposition toward the 
world's ideals which the divine life, had it all 
initiative in its own keeping, would ceaselessly 
adopt. 

V 

This does not mean, however, that the Chris- 
tian is to seclude himself from the world as far as 
it is possible so to do. Once again, it has to be 
pointed out that the Christian is to make his 
ethical adjustments, so far as he makes them 
from his own initiative, as the divine life within 
him would make them if his initiative were sur- 
rendered to that divine life's grasp. And the 
divine life, manifesting itself through, dictating 
to, and developing itself by, the ethical activities 
of every hour, would have no fear of the secular 
world, and, while recognising its hostility and the 
divergence of its ideals, would be in the world 
though not of it, and would certainly not run 
away. Since the world in some measure thrusts 
itself upon the field, thus making some relation 
with it inevitable, the fact that the inner life is 



152 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



to develop itself through that inevitable relation- 
ship points rather to an acceptance and mastery 
of it than to an effort at abolishing it so far 
as such a thing may be. It is thus, therefore, 
that the Christian man must formulate his pro- 
gramme in regard to the world at large. 

Two opposed methods of ordering the conduct 
of life in this matter have always shown them- 
selves in Christian history since Christian history 
began. Some seek, for their soul's sake, to avoid 
contact with the external world so far as such 
avoidance is possible : looking upon the common 
affairs and the common interests and the common 
societies of human life as forming, in the general 
geography of things, a sort of unhealthful dis- 
trict whence all manner of poisonous airs are sure 
to blow, they keep at as great a distance from all 
these things as they can, at any rate doing no 
more than skirt the edges of the infected land; 
and when necessity compels them, as it sometimes 
will, to make an excursion into the danger-zone, 
they carefully muffle themselves, before setting 
out, in some cloak of what others might call sanc- 
timoniousness, which will serve, they hope, to ren- 
der them safe from attack. There are people who 
refuse — or go as near as they can to refusing — 
to see or hear, or even know, what goes on in 
the general haunts of men. And contrasted with 
this is the method of those who mingle freely 



CHRISTIAN'S RELATION TO WORLD 153 

with the activities of the great world, who believe 
that on the whole, notwithstanding certain risks, 
it is better to let the general life press up close 
against the particular individual life, and whose 
aim is rather to maintain the soul pure amid all 
the temptations involved in this procedure than 
to secure for it the artificial and inferior safety 
which seclusion may bring. 

That something is to be said for the method of 
seclusion, it is not necessary to deny. It has at 
any rate an appearance of spiritual thoroughness : 
it gives an air of sanctity to those who adopt it : 
it emphasises the essential separateness between 
religious and secular ideals. But on the other 
hand, the method of preserving the soul's health, 
not away from, but in the midst of, and if need be 
in spite of, all the influences of the world, pro- 
duces a type of character more robust and virile 
than the other, and it is, besides, more in accord 
with the idea that a true man proves himself, not 
by being taken out of the world, but by being 
kept from the evil. And the Christian method of 
ethics, as we have it before us, would repeat with 
added force some of the objections to the system 
of seclusion which even ordinary observation 
suggests. 

Treating the ethical question as a question of 
spiritual biology — in other words, making his 
ethical adjustments as the divine life within him 



154 THE CHEISTIAI:^ METHOD OF ETHICS 

would make them, did it have all the manage- 
ment of life in its own power — the Christian man 
must, for one thing, reckon with this outstanding 
fact. In programmes of life which include any- 
thing like an isolated and secluded culture of the 
soul, there lies an undoubted danger — the danger 
that the soul is being unfitted, as under a similar 
policy the body becomes unfitted, for the sudden 
changes of temperature and atmosphere which 
at some time or other are bound to come. The 
idea of secluding the inner life from all, or nearly 
all, the influences radiating out of the general life 
of men cannot, after all, be carried out : suddenly 
the moment is sure to announce itself when, for 
some reason not to be denied or evaded, the man 
who has hitherto contrived to keep his life free 
from many points of contact with the larger life 
outside is compelled to go forth on the ways 
where the crowds are gathered ; and he will there 
feel all the greater strangeness, be all the more 
unable to adjust himself to the new conditions, 
for his unaccustomedness to the road. The con- 
ditions of life make it impossible that any man 
should permanently stand apart. Every indi- 
vidual is too deeply involved in the great whole. 
The recluse, long as he may succeed in escaping 
the temptations which find their hunting-ground 
out in the populated centres of life, has to quit 
his retirement at length; and his soul, having de- 



CHRISTIAN'S RELATION TO WORLD 155 

veloped no powers of resistance, being unpractised 
in the cut and thrust of spiritual warfare, is the 
more Hkely to succumb. The method of cherishing 
the soul's health in some carefully guarded and 
hermetically sealed chamber produces in the soul 
a debility which exposes it to double danger when 
it faces, as face it must, the stronger blasts it has 
not previously been permitted to feel. From the 
point of view of the development of life, therefore 
— the point of view which the Christian man must 
endeavour to take — the method of seclusion fails 
to secure the safety which at a superficial glance it 
may seem likely to win, and becomes a method of 
actual danger and loss. Which is to say that in 
the light of the idea of a developing divine life it 
stands out as a method to be condemned rather 
than praised. 

It has to be added, besides, that the life of God 
in man would never consent to look upon the 
great world as if God Himself had withdrawn 
from it, and would hold such a procedure as a 
betrayal of its own claims. The Christian man 
must consequently admit that the method of 
seclusion, the method of marking off the larger 
part of human life as out of bounds, is really 
faithless, implying that God has practically with- 
drawn from the general order of things and left 
evil in undisputed possession of the field. It is 
indeed pessimism of the most extreme kind to 



156 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



hold that out in the wide realms where men are 
fulfilling their purposes and ideals, out among 
the different impulses whereby the masses of men 
are moved, out in the region of jostling personali- 
ties and gathered thoughts and crowded wills 
and closely-packed activities — that out there noth- 
ing is to be met with but what is evil! Such 
despair of the general system of things could 
hardly consist, surely, with a religion founded on 
faith in a living God ! The method of self-seclu- 
sion from the general movement of the world is 
essentially and practically atheistic, indignantly as 
it would repudiate the charge ; for it assumes that 
God has abandoned His own creation, has died to 
all interest in and all control over the multiplex 
businesses of the creatures whom He has made. 
And this, which is the conclusion at which ordi- 
nary reasoning about the matter would arrive, 
becomes emphasised as the only right conclusion 
when we survey the matter from the standpoint 
of the divine life and the verdicts it would pro- 
nounce. The divine life would not abandon the 
world to the sway of wrong, nor take up any atti- 
tude toward the world which implied that such 
an abandonment had been made. It would rather 
claim all the world for its own. And the Christian 
man must make a similar claim for himself and 
for the divine life by which in part he is made. 
It is admitted, of course, that for the Christian 



CHEISTIAN'S EELATION TO WOELD 157 

man, at his present level of experience, there lies, 
in contact with the world and in mingling with its 
activities, a risk which would not be incurred were 
he wholly surrendered to an initiative higher than 
his own. And clearly, therefore, it is not the 
part of wisdom to go forth into the great world 
without taking precautions for spiritual safety. 
But just as it was stated, in the treatment of the 
previous question, that the desire for the spirit of 
contented indifference toward material good tends 
to bring about its own fulfilment, so in the present 
connection a statement on similar lines may be 
made. The desire to live, in regard to the world 
at large, as the unfettered divine life within would 
dictate, tends also to fulfil itself, and, while driv- 
ing the Christian man into all legitimate contacts 
with the world, will keep him back from all con- 
tacts that could harm. To put it in another way, 
if the Christian man, failing the perfect regulative 
effect of the fact of the life of God, allows the 
idea of it to have regulative power, he will be in 
large degree prepared to face the risks which his 
contact with the world is bound to involve. To 
be constantly possessed by that idea in sincerity 
is to put the nature through a process — ^rather, to 
keep it constantly undergoing a process — whereby 
it is fitted to endure the various influences im- 
pinging upon it from the secular world. The 
Christian man, in so far as he retains the ethical 



158 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

government of his world-relations within his 
power, will keep that government on right lines 
by earnestly and persistently willing to order it as 
it would be ordered if the divine life were all in 
all. The will to do so is itself a safeguard — both 
an inspiration and a restraint. A certain risk 
remains, it is true. But one need not be afraid 
to say that the soul which would be great must 
take some risks. And we come back, at the end 
of the matter, to a point closely kindred with one 
insisted on in the previous chapter — that the finest 
Christian achievement is to show the distinctive 
Christian quality upon the common ways. So 
may we say now that it is a nobler achievement 
to make and keep something approaching to saint- 
hood among so many things which in their malev- 
olence seem bent upon tripping and spoiling it, 
than to make and keep it in a seclusion where 
bolts and bars hold temptations at bay. This, at 
any rate, is the Christian's call. 

VI 

One other point remains in connection with the 
Christian's relation to the world at large. If he 
seek to adjust that relation as though the divine 
life were manifesting itself in it, dictating to it, 
and developing itself from it, he will be driven, 
not only into the defensive hostility towards the 
world of which we have previously spoken, but 



CHEISTIAN'S EELATION TO WORLD 159 

into an aggressive hostility which endeavours to 
win and overcome the world's evil and bring the 
world into captivity to the good. This, assuredly, 
is what the divine life would do ; and the Chris- 
tian must adopt for himself and on his own ac- 
count, must identify himself with, the movement 
which the divine life would make. The ordinary 
doctrine that it is a Christian's duty to set himself 
into open warfare with the evil that is in the 
world (once again, a commonplace of Christian 
ethics, like the other doctrines spoken of in this 
chapter) becomes doubly strong in its appeal, and 
infinitely more binding, when set in the light of 
that regulative principle whereby, as we are 
throughout insisting. Christian activity is tO' be 
directed and inspired. 

The Christian spirit, therefore, is aggressive in 
regard to all the unchristian spirits whereof the 
world is full ; and it will not be content unless the 
one right method of living which it believes itself 
to have found is being pressed upon the accept- 
ance of those that follow other methods; and 
whoso calls himself by the Christian name must 
realise that he has not only to guard himself 
against the evil infection of the world, but has to 
see to it that his own better influence shall infect 
the world. The Christian has not only a defence 
to maintain: he has an aggressive and offensive/ 
warfare to wage. And the quieter and more 



160 THE CHRISTIAlSr METHOD OP ETHICS 

gracious aspects of the Christian system of life, 
important as they are, must not be so exclusively 
emphasised that this truth becomes obscured. It 
is worth noting that in the life which is governed 
and ordered according to the Christian method, 
there is room for well-nigh every instinct which 
finds a place in human nature — room, at any rate, 
for every instinct transfigured and transformed, 
purged of its base alloy and refined to purer gold. 
The instincts and impulses wherewith man works 
out his tragedies and his crimes are seized upon 
by the Christian spirit, when man submits, and lo ! 
those impulses and instincts become the very in- 
struments wherewith man may hasten the coming 
of the kingdom of God. That old fighting in- 
stinct, that sheer love of battle, that rejoicing in 
a death-grapple with an implacable foe — which 
is one of the instincts whereby, in its untrans- 
J formed and primitive condition, man is brought 
nearest to the brutes — becomes, in its Christian- 
ised shape, one of the things whereby man is set 
closest to God. In the life rightly adjusted accord- 
ing to the Christian ethical method, there is room 
even for that — more even than room, rather an 
actual demand and call. The Christian must do 
battle on behalf of the sovereignty of good against 
all usurpers filling the thrones that good should 
occupy; and in his heart there must be — if he 
realises what is involved in the spiritual condi- 



CHEISTIAN'S EELATION TO WOELD 161 

tion he claims to have reached — a passionate im- 
patience with all that the divine life forbids or 
disapproves, an eagerness to smite down whatso- 
ever is an offence in its eyes. The Christian is 
to be, not only the frontier-guard who permits 
no enemy to pass, but the knight of a holy chiv- 
alry who goes forth to challenge all that does not 
yield to the supreme and rightful claim. 

There is a bigotry of which the Christian world 
has shown far too much — the bigotry of mere 
opinion, intolerant of intellectual conclusions dif- 
ferent from its own. There is a proud aggres- 
siveness of which the Christian world has shown 
far too little — the proud aggressiveness of those 
who realise that the spirit they seek to obey is 
the one spirit with a right to the obedience of all. 
The Christian conduct of life, one needs to reit- 
erate and insist, is not completely attained unless 
something of that aggressiveness enter in. The 
Christian who has never, in all charity and yet in 
all firmness, sought to make evil ashamed of 
itself — who has never, with entire absence of 
pride in himself, and yet with fulness of pride in 
the cause to which, as partaker of the divine life 
of God through Christ, he is vowed, declared by 
deed or word, in the sight or hearing of others, 
that wrong shall not have its way — who has 
never, through firmness of attitude or resolute- 
ness of speech, struck one good blow upon the 



162 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

foul spirits that are ever rearing their heads — is 
not worthy to bear the Christian name. The 
Christian must be conscious of, and must fight 
for, that royalty and that majesty which inhere 
in the very life of God — the life which has already 
in part supplanted his own, and to the lines of 
whose activity he seeks to conform whatever 
activities of his own may still remain. Only so 
does the divine life in him both manifest itself 
through and develop itself from his contacts with 
the hostile ideals of the world. 

VII 

(C) The Christian and the Shortness 
OF Life 

Nothing has hitherto been said concerning the 
brevity of this present life as a fact to be taken 
into account by the Christian in adjusting his 
attitude toward the things of the world. That 
the fact has significance in this connection is 
generally admitted and understood ; and inasmuch 
as this life is even as a vapour that passes away, 
the Christian is exhorted not to bind himself too 
closely and fervently to its interests, but to fix his 
heart upon the things that are above. The things 
that are seen are temporal, and the things that are 
not seen are eternal. And for this reason, the 



1 



CHEISTIAN'S RELATION TO WORLD 163 | 

Christian is to sit loosely to all earthly affairs, to | 

withdraw his gaze from that which is immediate s 
and near and to fix it upon the far horizons where 

time melts into eternity, remembering always that j 

his citizenship is in heaven. ] 

That the shortness of life is indeed to be a j 

regulative factor in the Christian's self-adjust- \ 

ment to the world is, from our present point of i 
view, as from any other that can claim to be 

rational, to be admitted as an indisputable truth. | 

What we have now to do is to relate the truth to I 

the general line of thought which in these pages i 

we are following out, to show its basis, and per- I 

haps to make some qualification in the deduction \ 

ordinarily drawn — ^the deduction that with a reali- j 

sation of life's transiency interest in this present j 

life must of necessity fade. ] 

Clearly (and this is the first thing to be > 

grasped) he whose supreme interest lies in the j 

development of the eternal life within him must ; 

have a vivid and abiding consciousness of how ! 

fleeting are all the things of time. It is, so to ; 

say, part of the essential self-realisation of the i 

divine life in man that it should ceaselessly ap- ^ 

prehend the transiency of the material stage on i 

which for the time being it performs its part. j 

It must necessarily know itself as enduring: it ; 

must necessarily know the world as passing away ; ; 

and the two contrasting and yet complementary ; 

i 



164 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

facts must be ever present to its apprehension. 
A life which at the same time manifests itself 
in and develops itself through — acts upon and is 
reacted upon by — its relations with the world 
must keep firm grip upon the cardinal realities of 
the situation, since only as they are rightly and 
vividly apprehended do those realities react upon 
life in a way that makes for good. The Christian, 
therefore, making the idea of a developing life 
within him regulative of his ethical attitudes, 
must similarly remind himself — must not shirk 
the fact or attempt to thrust it below the line of 
sight — that the fashion of the world passeth 
away. 

It is probably true to say that the idea of life's 
brevity is an idea which we try to keep off as far 
as we can. Life is short, certainly — but why 
notice the fact before we are obliged to do so? 
There is too much sadness in it : it is one of those 
things about which, for the sake of our own hap- 
piness, the less said the better. It will force it- 
self upon us soon enough — till then, let it be for- 
gotten, or, if that cannot be, let us at any rate 
pretend that it is forgotten. Though the enemy 
approaches, let us at least refuse to speak his 
name. If he be looking upon us from his am- 
bush, waiting for his moment to spring upon 
us and make us his prey, we will not look that 
way. This is the attitude of most. And it is 



CHRISTIANAS EELATION TO WORLD 165 



the attitude of the generality of religious men 
and women, no less than of others: their pro- 
fession of faith in Christianity and in Christ, al- 
though they may say that it robs death of its 
sting, does not make them any the more willing 
to grow familiar with the company of the idea; 
and the Christian keeps at a distance the thought 
— the sad, dread thought, as even he considers 
it — of the quick and sure slipping past of the 
days.^ 

Obviously, it is quite impossible to make the 
best use, for purposes of spiritual development, of 
the position in which we stand, so long as we 
thus leave one of its essential elements out of the 
reckoning. If there be a term set for us a little 
way ahead, the fact ought somehow to influence 
our mood and conduct, our entire moral posture, 
at every moment till the term is reached ; and we 
lose the influence it ought to have, if we thrust 
the thought of it aside. If the days be numbered 
for us, life ought surely to be a different thing 
— differently ordered, differently inspired, with 
different ideals and with all its emphasis falling 
on different places — than it would be if the days 
had no appointed bound ; and he who gets as near 
as he can to living as though the days had no 

^ Rudyard Kipling makes one of his characters say, not 
very elegantly, but with only too much of truth, "How 
these Christians funk death ! " 



166 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

appointed bound, will find his life, to say the least 
of it, deformed, and the emphasis of his living 
wrongly set. The inner life cannot work itself 
out on right lines or to true issues (and it is from 
the point of view of life's development, from the 
point of view of spiritual biology, that this ques- 
tion, like all the rest, is to be considered) if one 
of the most commanding facts of the situation be 
expelled from its place in our thought. A life 
from above, permeating and penetrating the lower 
life of man, would most assuredly find in the tran- 
siency of the present system of things one of 
the cardinal points of its compass, so to say — one 
of the outstanding truths by which its self-adjust- 
ment would be set. The Christian man, govern- 
ing himself by the idea of the development of life 
within, must similarly make himself familiar with 
the fact of the brevity of his connection with 
earthly things; for only as its brevity is recog- 
nised can that connection become a factor making 
for an inner development that is true. Life's 
shortness is not a fate which he is to forget so 
long as he can : it is a fact to be faced and used — 
a fact neither good nor bad except as his use of it 
makes it one or the other^ — a fact from which it 
is his business to draw some influence and effect 
back upon every passing day. Only so does he 
set himself in the same relation to the fact as that 
in which he would be set by a divine life mani- 



CHEISTIAN'S EELATION" TO WOELD 167 

festing itself in and feeding itself upon its rela- 
tions with the world. 

VIII 

It is necessary, however, that the shortness of 
life should be remembered in the right spirit, and 
that, when remembered, it should produce the 
right result. For remembrance of the fact may 
operate in mistaken ways ; and the Christian man 
must see to it that he faces the fact as the divine 
life itself would face it — as it would be faced by a 
life both manifesting itself in and developing 
itself through its attitude to the transitory world. 
And this at once excludes the method of those 
who say (with what sincerity or absence of sin- 
cerity need not here be discussed) that, because 
life is short, life is worthless too; who declare 
that they are longing with eager passion for the 
day when earthly things shall trouble them no 
more ; who do their best to make all hearers un- 
derstand that, whatever any one else may be, 
they at least are only pilgrims and strangers here ; 
who revel in a sort of sentimental sorrow that 
they were ever unfortunate enough to stray into 
this world at all. The underlying idea in all this 
is that the true soul puts up with life because it 
must, but is glad to hurry through it with all pos- 
sible speed. The inference is that because this life 
is a thing soon to pass, and a thing which docs 



168 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

not seem to come to very much, it is therefore 
a thing to be lightly esteemed, if not despised. 

It is not thus that a divine life, manifesting it- 
self in and feeding itself upon all its world- 
relations, would take the case. It is not in this 
attitude, therefore, that the Christian man must 
set himself. The formula points first, it is true, 
to a refusal to identify life with the things of 
earth and time, since they come but to pass away ; 
but it points, next, to an actual renewal of inter- 
est, from the spiritual point of view, in the things 
of earth and time, and to a determination that, 
although they themselves do not abide, they shall 
be made to work some moral education in us 
which shall abide when they themselves are gone. 
Whoso rightly learns the lesson of life's change 
and life's decay and life's swiftly approaching 
close, will first lose interest in all the contents of 
life for what they are in themselves, but will 
then come back to them and clasp them and sound 
them and hold fast to them, with fresh interest 
in the opportunity of spiritual training and 
growth — an opportunity so short and so soon to 
be gone — which they afford. Life is short — not 
worth troubling about very much, then. That 
may well be the first word. But life is short — 
then all the more eagerly must its experiences be 
cared for, and all the more fully must they be 
lived through, and all the greater must interest 



CHEISTIAN'S EELATION TO WOELD 169 

in them grow, lest there be hidden in them some 
offer of spiritual education which we do not ac- 
cept — an offer which the quickly moving years 
bear further and further from us, and which can 
never return. That must be the next word. The 
inference is not that, because life is brief, life is 
worthless too. The inference is that, because 
life is brief, it has all the greater worth. Every 
second ticks off something from the duration of 
the spiritual opportunity which lies before us; 
and we must waken all the keener interest in life's 
duties and responsibilities and relationships, that 
we may make the most, for our spiritual culture, 
of the time we have. They who treat the matter 
of life's swift passing from the point of view of 
spiritual biology, will be hungering and athirst 
to taste life to the full — ^not that in itself it is a 
thing to which they would be bound, but that out 
of all its experience, rightly embraced and worth- 
ily used, the soul may learn and grow. For the 
inner life is to feed itself upon and develop itself 
from its relations with the transitory world. The 
sense of how swiftly life passes is not to kill life's 
interest or to make life a worthless thing in our 
eyes, but to impart to it an interest higher, purer, 
and therefore keener too, than it ever possessed 
before. For every detail and every engagement 
of it may have some moral and spiritual reaction 
upon the character we bear; and the very swift- 



170 THE CHRISTIAN" METHOD OF ETHICS 

ness of its passing should cause us to see to it all 
the more earnestly that none of its spiritual pos- 
sibilities be missed. 

Mere detachment from life on the ground of its 
transiency is not the attitude which Christian 
ethics prescribes. Detachment from hfe for what 
it is in itself may come first; but there must 
follow a using and a probing of life for whatever 
it may have to give toward the perfecting of the 
soul. Detachment — yet use: it is to a union of 
the two that the true consideration of the matter 
should lead. Many try to detach themselves from 
life in a manner and in a measure, realising that 
because it does not endure, it cannot be a thing 
to which the heart should cling; but they fail to 
understand that it is a thing filled through and 
through with spiritual uses, and that therefore 
— precisely because it does not endure — it must 
be all the more earnestly lived while it is here. 
Consecration to highest ideals sets us free from 
the things of this our present life — ^true. But 
consecration to highest ideals brings us back into 
contact — though it be a different and finer con- 
tact — with the things of this our present life once 
more. For they are the instruments whereby the 
highest ideals are to be wrought out — the steps 
on which we climb heavenward — the earthly food 
which the spirit in us is to transmute into health 
and strength of soul. 



CHRISTIAN'S EELATION" TO WOELD 171 

So must the Christian man use the fact of the 
shortness of life for his good. So is he in the 
world and yet not of it, one of its keenest citizens 
and yet with his home in heaven. So does he 
conquer death — not fearing it and yet not desiring 
by one instant to hasten its steps, indifferent when 
it may befall, so that it does but find life's spiritual 
opportunity used to the full. So does he adjust 
his own attitude as the divine life within him 
would adjust it if it had all its power. And so 
does he, in at least one of the important affairs 
of Christian ethics, bring the ideal governing it 
into closest relation with the one supreme ideal 
that ought to govern all. 



VII 



THE CHRISTIAN'S RELATION TO HIS 
FELLOW-MEN 

WE pass from the topic of the Christian's 
relations with the world to that of his 
relations with his fellow-men. And we treat it by 
the same method, as a question of spiritual biol- 
ogy, asking how the matter would be dealt with 
by a divine life manifesting itself through the 
ethical situations of every day, and remembering 
that the Christian, so far as he retains the ethical 
initiative of his life in his own hands, is to order 
things as the divine life within him would order 
them if it had perfect sway. It is to be noted, how- 
ever, that in dealing with this subject we have the 
advantage of being able to make a much more 
immediate and direct use of the example of Jesus 
Christ than is possible in many other cases; and 
this fact will assist and govern us in our dealing 
with the theme. In the great majority of ethical 
questions it is scarcely possible to find in the life 
of Christ a situation which, in its setting, in its 
outward conditions, corresponds with exactness 
to our own: the whole method and object of His 
life removed Him far from many of the matters 

172 



KELATION TO FELLOW-MEN" 173 j 

which bulk most largely in the lives of ordinary \ 

men; and while one may be able to run lines of | 

connection from the spirit which He manifested | 

in His own sphere to the spirit which we ought to ^ 

manifest in ours, and thus obtain some guidance, , 
anything like an actual imitation is out of the 

question, because no actual example has been set. ^ 

And there is, besides, the fact that the developing j 

history of the world has given rise to many ethical j 

problems which had no existence at all in the time ? 

of Christ. The system of Christian ethics which I 

adopts the formula " Imitate Christ " as all- j 

sufficing is bound to find that on many of the j 

most pressing modern themes its formula yields '; 

no help. But here, as regards the relations of the j 

Christian to his fellow-men, as regards the law of \ 

Love and the principles whereby its application \ 

should be regulated, the matter is altogether dif- 1 

ferent. Here Christ occupied the same position I 

as we occupy. The factors of the situation are ; 

identical for Him and for us. Not the uniqueness > 

of Christ's Person, not the altogether special : 

character of His ministry, not the changes in the i 

constitution of society which the intervening ? 

centuries have wrought, put any distance between j 

Him and us in this regard. He worked, so far as j 

this matter is concerned, on the same stage, and • 

had the same part to sustain. He wrought in the j 

same material, used the same colours, had the \ 



174 THE CHRISTIAIT METHOD OF ETHICS 



same canvas before Him. And we can therefore 
refer back for an example to the story of his life, 
confident that that example will be waiting for us 
there, only needing to be drawn out into the light 
and surveyed with attentive and obedient regard. 
In this sphere of the mutual relations of men we 
can make our lives a reproduction of the life of 
Jesus as it is in no other sphere possible for us to 
do ; for in this sphere, as in hardly any other, He 
lived precisely our life. Side by side, then, with 
the statement that the Christian man is to adjust 
his relations with his fellows as the divine life 
within him would adjust them if it had perfect 
sway, we set the other statement that he is to 
adjust them as Christ adjusted His. Or rather, 
we may say that in the life of Christ we have a 
perfect concrete instance of the working out of 
the formula which the first statement contains. 
For His Father worked " hitherto," and He 
worked ; and it was by the divine life in Him that 
all the doing of Christ was really done. 

I 

(A) The Law of Love 

It is not necessary to prove that the first law of 
men's mutual relations, according to the Christian 
ethical system, is the law of love. This is ac- 
cepted as an axiom by every one who claims to 



EELATIOIT TO FELLOW-MEN 175 

understand Christianity or to bear the Christian 
name. What is necessary, however, is to see how 
from our present standpoint the law is grounded, 
and how much more binding and far-reaching it 
becomes. The Christian is to be set toward men 
as the divine life is set toward them: his spirit 
toward them is to be that of God in him ; and it is 
on the fact that God is Love, and that the Chris- 
tian's ethical attitudes and movements are to re- 
produce the attitudes and movements of God, 
that the obligation to brotherly kindness is based. 
We are taken, that is to say, on this view, beyond 
mere generalities about human brotherhood — 
generalities which are inspiring enough in the 
sound of them, but which not seldom break down 
and lose their power precisely when the critical 
moment of testing arrives. It is not so much the 
fact that he is the brother of his fellow-men, and 
is therefore bound to show him honour, render 
him service, and keep for him a warm place in his 
heart — true as these things are — from which the 
Christian starts. This fact becomes rather the 
fact at which he arrives — having started from the 
other fact that the life of God, which is a life of 
love, is in part the life that makes him, and that 
his ethical activities are, so far as he himself 
guides them, to be adjusted as the life of God, 
which is a life of love, would adjust them if it 
made him wholly. Brotherhood, in other words, 



176 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



is the love of God at one remove; and it is obli- 
gatory upon the Christian man, not so much per 
se, as being involved in the fact that God, with 
His lovingness, dwells within him, and that the 
idea of this in-dwelling is to be regulative of all 
the Christian's ways. The Christian man will be 
loving brother to men, not so much because he 
looks to men as because he looks to God. God 
is in him in part : for the rest, he must bear him- 
self as though God were in him wholly ; and God 
is Love. 

It was thus, in fact, that Christ grounded His 
own attitude of tenderness and ser\dce toward 
men. His relations with men were what they were 
because of His relations with God : love, in Him, 
was simply His oneness with the Father working 
itself out in its natural consequences on the side 
of His human connections ; and one need not fear 
to say that His graciousness toward men was due, 
not so much to the claims of mankind without 
Him, as to the claims of God within Him. The 
ordinary phrases concerning brotherhood seldom 
or never came from His lips. It was not from 
that centre that He worked. Somewhat remark- 
able this may appear to be, when we remember 
how Christ was the perfect example of kindness in 
love and ministry to suffering and needy men, 
and how He is universally so acclaimed to-day; 
but the fact is so. One cannot read the Gospels 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN m 



without feeling that what Christ did for men — 
all His offices of help and healing, all His chari- 
ties, all His " mighty works " on men's behalf — 
came directly out of His perfect surrender to the 
divine life, were motived in that, flowed out of 
that as a stream flows from its source. Man's 
need drew mercy from Him, true; but it did so 
primarily because He was one with the Father. 
It was, indeed, to that oneness that man's need 
made its appeal. Christ's union with God implied 
love. Christ's love was that union acting itself 
out in a particular way and within a particular 
sphere. This it is that gives a touch of some- 
thing like austerity (though the word is scarcely 
a happy one, and is employed only in default of 
a better) even to the most helpful and engaging 
ministries Christ wrought. The frenzied enthu- 
siasm of brotherhood, so frequently commended 
to-day as being the supreme manifestation of the 
Christian spirit, is never there. It is always 
toward God— toward the Source of the life in 
Him — that Christ is looking, even when it is 
upon man that His healing hands are laid. Con- 
fronted by the man born blind, for example. His 
word is that " We must work the works of him 
that sent me, while it is day." * It is the pres- 
sure of the divine life within that makes, forces 
out, motives, the marvellous love. Or, again, at 
one of the classic passages wherein the Apostle 
*John ix. 4. 



178 THE CHEISTIAi^ :\IETHOD OF ETHICS 

Paul speaks of the wonderful self-abnegation of 
Christ for man's sake, the same thing comes out. 
" He humbled himself, becorning obedient even 
unto death " ^ — obedient unto death. It is of 
unselfishness among Christ's disciples that the 
apostle is writing : surely, as he points to the ex- 
ample Christ Himself has set, he will speak of 
Him as having been loving and unselfish even 
unto death ! But no — obedient is the word. The 
moving impulse in Christ's self-sacrifice was pri- 
marily in His relation of utter obedience to every 
inspiration His Father sent Him; which is but 
another way of saying that it was in His relation 
of entire oneness with His Father's life. His 
very love to man was itself a consequence of — 
rather, another aspect of — His intimate union 
with God. 

In saying that the Christian is to make the idea 
of the divine life within him regulative of his 
attitude toward his fellows we are, therefore, 
bidding the Christian do what Christ Himself 
did — save, of course, that with Christ it was 
never the mere idea, but always the fact, that 
performed the controlling work. And the lesson 
for the Christian on this matter is twofold. First, 
let the divine life, so far as it is within you, and 
the idea of it, so far as you still retain the ethical 
initiative of your life in your own keeping, order 
your relations with your brethren; and so you 
1 Philippians ii. 5. 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 179 

will be driven into love from within, rather than 
drawn into it from without. And next, come 
back from the enthusiastic talk about brother- 
hood (which has its rightful place, certainly, but 
only as the implication in and the consequence 
of a larger idea, and not as being itself the idea 
from which the start is made) to see how much 
more surely the law of love is grounded when it 
is taken as following from the conception of a 
divine life energising within. Indeed, one of the 
lessons the world most greatly needs to learn is 
that we shall not keep our relations true with man 
unless the stress of the whole thing falls, not upon 
those relations, but upon our relation with the life 
of God. The obvious truth is that they who are 
really one with God will not and cannot be hard- 
hearted toward men. The modern world thinks 
itself to have found, in the magic word and the 
magic idea of brotherhood, the force which will 
redeem human relationships from their sordid- 
ness, and bring peace and good-will to the tumul- 
tuous and strife-torn earth. Religion, it has dis- 
covered, has been a selfish thing: the soul has 
concentrated itself upon its relations with its God, 
forgetting its relations with its kindred souls; 
and the world needs that we should lay less stress 
upon the saving of ourselves, and exalt into 
greater prominence the saving of those who wall< 
life's pathway at our side. Brotherhood, philan- 



180 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



thropy — they are the vaunted gospel-words of the 
age. Perhaps one might say, by way of at any 
rate partial reply, that the idea of brotherhood, 
loudly as it may be advocated in meeting and in 
press, shows small power to restrain men from 
coming to death-grips with one another when 
envious or angry passions are roused; and the 
long-continued proclamation of it has after all 
done comparatively little, either in private, na- 
tional or international, spheres, to make wars to 
cease and love supreme. It has to be confessed, 
on the other hand, that intensity of religious life 
has often gone hand in hand with hardness and 
self-seeking. But that could only be where the 
fact or idea of a divine life was not fully under- 
stood or submitted to. Wholly surrendered to 
the God who Himself is love, how can man be 
other than loving, or harden himself against those 
whom he is able to help? Let it be recalled once 
more that in Him whose spirit we are to possess 
and whose method we are to copy, it was the mind 
of obedience to God, the fact of oneness with God, 
that drove Him to serve and suffer for man: it 
was because God was all in all for Him and in 
Him that He became and still remains so much to 
us. The Christian man, making it his first con- 
cern to adjust his relations with his fellows as 
the divine life, if it swayed him wholly, would 
adjust them — ^making the fact or the idea of the 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 181 

divine life regulative in this matter as in others 
— will be moved, as a natural consequence, to 
love. It is true that human lives are bound to- 
gether, and should be so thought of. It is true 
that every man is his brother's keeper. But it is 
also true that the Christian man will best keep his 
brethren, so far as the duty of keeping them is 
his, by letting the divine life keep him. The 
treatment of the question of human relations as 
a question of spiritual biology leads to the con- 
clusion that the Christian must be — not through 
supplementary or inferential considerations, how- 
ever powerful, but simply because he is a Chris- 
tian — a man whose life toward his fellows is love. 
To say the second thing is, indeed, but to say the 
first in other words. For God is in the Christian ; 
and God is love. 

II 

It will easily be seen that if the Christian's 
relations with his fellows are taken as thus regu- 
lated — if the law of love be taken as binding sim- 
ply because it is implied in the fact of a divine life 
within — love becomes a much more energising, a 
much more constant, thing in life than it becomes 
under any other method of advocating its claims. 
For one thing, if the Christian aims at adjusting 
his attitude toward his brethren in the indicated 
way, every opportunity of service becomes a duty, 



182 THE CHRISTIAN" METHOD OF ETHICS 

a direct and binding call. For, in so far as such 
language can be employed of God at all, it might 
be said that it is thus God Himself views the 
matter, and it is thus, therefore, that God's life 
in the Christian would view them. It is not too 
much to declare, concerning God's relations with 
humanity, that God exists for men and the good 
of men : His activities of beneficence toward men 
are never a mere incident among other activities 
toward them ; and wherever human need touches 
upon His infinite resource, wherever His infinite 
resource comes into contact with human need, 
there, as a natural consequence, love flows out 
from the resource upon the need. It is for pur- 
poses of love that God puts Himself in contact 
with human life. The Christian man, reckoning 
the matter in. similar fashion, must take every 
opportunity, every possibility, of serv^ice to his 
fellows, as naturally implying the outflow of love. 
He must realise himself, whenever he is brought 
close, in possibility of helping or saving, to any 
kindred life, to be a part of that eternal movement 
of love which does not pick and choose, but gives 
itself naturally at the instant of necessity's touch. 
An opportunity is always more than an oppor- 
tunity. It is a direct and binding call. It be- 
comes, in this view, a part of the eternal fore- 
ordaining by which Eternal Love works out the 
good of the world. 



RELATION TO FELLOW-MEIST 183 

It was thus that Christ Himself read the mat- 
ter. " We must work the works of him that sent 
us, while it is day," He said on the occasion of 
that miracle to which we have previously referred. 
Standing there with those darkened eyes before 
Him, His thought takes a far-reaching range. 
Not " We may/' but " We must." The meeting 
with this man was a direct call and command 
from the Father. There was present in Christ, 
not a mere sentiment of compassion, however 
sincere and deep — not only a passing wave of 
pity, however strong — not simply a loving desire 
to bring that maimed life relief — not only these 
things, though of course all these things were 
there — ^but the mighty, irresistible constraint of 
the knowledge that the dealing with this man 
was fore-ordained in the eternal Father's thought, 
and was part of the divinely appointed mission 
of the Son. And thus, always. He moved among 
men with no doubt as to the right place and time 
in which to manifest His power, with no hesitancy 
as to the proper channels through which His heal- 
ing grace should run. Every broken life that 
presented itself before Him was in His eyes a 
command from God that there and then His 
power of restoration should awaken; and every 
soul, stricken with spiritual poverty or foul with 
the loathsomeness of sin — every such soul on 
which His tender gaze fell bore upon it, in its 



184 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

very poverty and sin, the proof that it had been 
divinely selected for the manifestation of a holy 
work of love. 

Opportunity makes duty — the Christian who 
seeks to adjust himself in all things as the divine 
life would adjust itself and him, will take that 
as an established principle. And, if he takes it 
so, the idea of responsibility will have a very 
much stronger hold upon him than it has upon 
many. All admit, of course, that they are re- 
sponsible for the exercise of holy charities toward 
their fellow-men : they find no difficulty in yielding 
assent to that general statement ; but that general, 
diluted responsibility presses very lightly upon the 
majority, and moves them to few out-pourings of 
beneficence or help. But the thought that every 
instance of human need we meet and every cry 
we hear wrung from human lips and every tear 
we see falling from human eyes — ^that these 
things are in themselves a present witness to our 
present responsibility, is a much more constrain- 
ing thing. And that thought follows naturally 
from the principle that the Christian man is to 
order his relations with his fellow-men as the 
divine life in him would order those relations if 
it had perfect control and power. God goes out in 
love naturally, by the instinctive movement of 
His nature (of course one speaks after the man- 
ner of men) whenever human need touches His 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 185 



infinite resource. Translated into a Christian 
ethical programme, this means that for the Chris- 
tian man every opportunity is a duty, a direct and 
binding call. 

So far of actual service to our brethren. In 
many other ways, however, the adjustment of 
man's attitude to man under the regulative fact 
or idea of the divine life within will make human 
relations a sweeter and more sensitive thing, tun- 
ing them to finer harmonies than the regulative 
idea of brotherhood would ever bring about. For 
instance (and this is but one of the many lines 
on which the matter may be followed out), the 
adjustment of our attitude towards our fellow- 
men on the indicated principle will not seldom 
mean self-repression, self-restraint — perhaps a 
finer and more difficult virtue than self-sacrifice 
itself. The love in the life of God manifests itself 
as much in restraint of power as in exercise of 
power ; and, in the classic Pauline passage alluded 
to earlier, we are reminded how the mind that 
was in Christ Jesus " counted it not a thing to be 
grasped to be on an equality with God," and are 
instructed, also, to have this mind in ourselves. 
It is not necessary, in order to appreciate the 
significance of this latter utterance, to enter into 
any of the more subtle theological implications 
which it may contain. Without that, the main 
point is clear. With the possibility open to Him 



186 THE CHEISTIAN" METHOD OF ETHICS 

of manifesting, in His relations to the world and 
to men, the very greatness and power of God 
Himself, the Christ kept the greatness to a large 
extent hidden and the power unused. He counted 
it not a thing to be grasped at that the strength in 
Him should do all it could. It is indeed, when 
one thinks of it, the surpassing miracle of Qirist's 
life — not that the wonders He did were so many, 
but that being what He was He left so many un- 
done, that, with power so irresistible leaping and 
palpitating in Him, He held it so rigidly re- 
strained. In that sense, Christ let some of His 
opportunities go by. He hid within Himself 
the glory which, had He permitted it to shine 
forth, would have compelled the world to worship 
and adore. The restraint of power, no less than 
the exercise of power, is, both with God and with 
the Christ whom He sent, one of the highest man- 
ifestations of love. 

So with the Christian, ordering himself on 
right principles, will it sometimes be. It is of 
course a far descent from the self-repression of 
God and Christ to any self-repression within the 
range of man; and yet the former is a thing 
which the divine life within the Christian man, 
or the regulative idea of the divine life, will in 
measure reproduce. The Christian man will take 
it as one of the governing ethical axioms of his 
life that — quite apart from any question of direct 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 187 



service or direct harm to his fellows — the fulness 
of power in him is sometimes, for his brethren's 
sake, not to be employed. It will not be enough 
for him that having done all he can and obtained 
all he can, he should hand over to others some- 
thing of what has resulted from his doing and 
his getting, dignifying that adjustment of the sit- 
uation by the title of self-sacrifice. He will, be- 
fore he begins his doing and his obtaining, re- 
member that others enter into the calculation, 
and, if his relations with these require it, will 
leave his strength unused. Self-sacrifice, in the 
sense of giving up things, is not a virtue for every 
day, because not every day are we in possession 
of anything that can be given up; but self-sup- 
pression, self-restraint, the holding back of some- 
thing we might do — the opportunity for that 
returns with far more frequent step. Even in the 
smallest of life's spheres it comes. In our very 
speech with one another the opportunity of self-re- 
pression may arise. With a word, we might per- 
haps assert our own wisdom and hush all reply; 
yet he who desires to live by the inspiration of the 
divine life will now and then keep silence, holding 
it not a thing to be grasped at to establish the 
superiority of his own mind. And nothing has 
been given: he to whom forbearance has been 
shown knows nothing about it and we ourselves 
are in no wise the poorer for the showing; yet a 



188 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

real Christian virtue has been brought into play. 
And passing from this instance, on the lowest 
plane as it is, to larger things, to the enterprise 
and activity of life, how often there come to us 
occasions when, with no wrong-doing, without 
any actual meanness for which the judgment of 
others could reproach us, we might win some pos- 
session we should so much like to have, reach 
some success which would thrill us with the glow 
of delight. Yet the possession and the success, 
did we seize them, would in some indefinable way 
— 'we could not reason it out perhaps, but the 
deepest vo-ices in us declare it — rub a little of the 
gold of life away for others: they would not 
recognise it as a loss, did we exert our power and 
take the prize : they will not recognise it as a gain, 
if we obey the better impulse and hold our hand : 
sacrifice there will not be in the sense of giving 
up something which another receives ; but by our 
grip upon ourselves we shall have kept our rela- 
tionship sweet with our fellow-men. In the com- 
mon intercourse of every day does the spirit of 
self-repression find ample opportunity. Self-sac- 
rifice implies the possession of something valuable 
and rich, more or less, on the part of him who is 
to make the sacrifice: the spirit of self-restraint 
implies nothing more than that touching of one 
ordinary life upon other ordinary lives which is 
the common lot of all. And inasmuch as the 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 189 

restraint of power is one of the constant ways 
of self-manifestation that the love in the divine 
life adopts, the restraint of power will be one of 
the constant ways of self-manifestation that love 
adopts in the case of the Christian man. Difficult 
to common human nature as it may be, it will 
come to be the natural thing for him who adjusts 
himself to his fellows in such wise as he would 
be adjusted to his fellows by God within. Foe 
it is for this restraint of power, amid many other 
fine and high and seemingly subtle orderings of 
man's attitude to man, that the divine life will 
call. And we are justified in declaring, after 
what has been said (though the point might be 
emphasised in many other ways), that if the ques- 
tion of man's relations to man be treated as a 
question of spiritual biology — if the fact of the 
divine life within, or the idea of the divine life 
within, be made regulative of those relations — 
love becomes a much more energising, a much 
more constant, a much more searching and sensi- 
tive thing, than it becomes under any other 
method of advocating its claims. 

Ill 

It is worth noting, although it is not necessary 
to elaborate the point at great length, that the 
Christian's love for man, if it flow from the regu- 
lative action of the divine life within him in its 



I 



190 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

fact or its idea, will keep the spiritual element pre- 
dominant, and will thus escape a danger into 
which love otherwise kindled may easily fall. It 
will not lay all the stress upon the mere minister- 
ing to a brother's secular benefit; and reform of 
material conditions, though obtaining all its 
rights, will not be held as the only important 
thing, nor viewed out of its relations with the 
higher good. Not that the Christian man will 
be heedless concerning it: in this sphere, as in 
others, duty will arise whenever opportunity pre- 
sents itself; and the Christian will be eager that 
the hungry shall be fed, the naked clothed, the 
prisons of disability opened for them that are 
bound, and throughout the social realm the accept- 
able year of the Lord ushered in. But love of 
the right order will remember that a view of life 
which takes only these things into account, or 
which dismisses other things with a mere formal 
recognition, is a view of life out of which the 
sense of true proportion has disappeared. It will 
remember that even reforms which are in- 
trinsically necessary, even progress which is un- 
doubtedly in the right direction, must not be 
looked on detached from the larger question of 
moral and spiritual condition. It will remem- 
ber that man does not live by bread alone. 
For this is the estimate of things, as to their rela- 
tive value, which the love in the divine life adopts, 



EELATION" TO FELLOW-MEJ^T 191 



and is therefore the estimate which must be 
adopted by the love dwelling in the Christian's 
heart. 

It is a real danger that is thus provided against. 
For, while welcoming every sign that Christian 
men are awaking to the pressing claims of social 
reform, rousing themselves to take up the duties 
which they have neglected too long, one cannot 
but feel that now and again the new-born love of 
to-day has too little of spiritual quality in it, and 
loses much of its value thereby. The enthusiasm 
of brotherhood forgets too often that the value of 
any reform depends, not alone upon what it is 
intrinsically, but upon its right relation to other 
things — that life is, or ought to be, a careful 
balance between many concerns — that a great 
deal of reform may come from a mistaken spirit 
in those who give it and address itself to a mis- 
taken spirit in those who receive it. Strange as 
it may sound, love itself may be materialistic: it 
may be simply materialism going out upon others 
instead of materialism staying at home. Not sel- 
dom the idea of progress is interpreted, even by 
Christian men, as if it had no spiritual content. 
Love, even in Christian men, not seldom turns its 
gaze away from spiritual horizons, and sees only 
what is of the earth, earthy. And, while no word 
is to be said by way of belittling or depreciating 
the passion for humanity, which through these 



192 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

later years is at last coming to its own, the wish 
may at least be uttered that it possessed a more 
constant and fuller understanding of the ideal 
for whose sake it should strive. It should come 
to all its own. 

From the indicated danger the Christian who 
adjusts his relations with men under the govern- 
ance of the divine life will be kept safe. He will 
love, but with a love full-orbed. Love in him will 
be mindful that any seeming benefit which takes 
his brethren still further in the direction of mate- 
rialistic absorption may really be a snare rather 
than a help. It will be mindful, through all its 
yearning passion, that a man's life consisteth not 
in the abundance of the things he possesseth — 
that progress divorced from vivid spiritual ideals 
is not worth the name — that the dominance of the 
spiritual, and this alone, can give ultimate and 
permanent value to the fair Utopias of the re- 
former's dreams. It will know that, without the 
predominance of the spiritual element, every door 
of material gain through which man presses, 
imagining himself to be getting nearer to the 
central chamber of perfect joy, really marks a step 
further to the dungeon and to doom. Through 
all its ministry it will hold man's spiritual inter- 
ests to be supreme. The bread that perisheth it 
will give when it can ; but the bread of life will be 
a yet more important thing in its regard.. In the 



KELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 193 

long run, nothing will matter to it — however 
other things may acquire temporary importance 
— but the soul. And so will love in the Christian 
be like the love in that divine life out of which it 
springs. 

IV 

(B) Love and Strength 

Side by side with the law of love we set the 
correlative law — the law of strength. It is, in 
one way, another aspect, or perhaps a qualifica- 
tion, of the law of love itself. In his relations 
with his fellows, the Christian man is to be no 
I flaccid sentimentalist, no obscurer of moral dis- 
tinctions for the sake of peace ; nor is his love for 
his brethren to betray him into mere slackness, or 
into a constant mildness of attitude which does 
not change whatever the moral situation of the 
moment may be. In his very love he is to be 
strong. 

Falling back upon our regulative conception, 
we see at once how the call to be strong issues 
therefrom. The Christian man is to bear himself 
after the dictates, and according to the impulses, 
of the divine life within. And in any action in- 
itiated from the indicated source or in any action 
adjusted by the Christian himself upon the lines 
which he thinks the impulses and dictates of the 
divine life would appoint, there could be nothing 



194 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

of that mere complacency to which good and evil 
are the same, nothing that savours of compromise 
with wrong, nothing of that moral feebleness 
which is so frequently mistaken for a grace. The 
divine life, transfused with love though it be, 
cannot look upon sin save with a frown: the 
Christian, did the divine life wholly make him, 
would therefore avoid any blinking of the dark 
colours of sin as he would avoid sin itself; and 
the Christian, seeking to govern himself (in the 
absence of a perfect government by the divine 
life) according to the idea of what the divine 
life would do, must be prepared to be sometimes 
strong as well as gracious and tender toward his 
fellows — knowing, indeed, that strength such as 
this, the strength of mood and judgment called 
out by the presence of wrong, is an essential part 
of the truest love. 

Basing itself upon other considerations, start- 
ing from another point, love not seldom forgets to 
be strong. Indeed, any one with a taste for epi- 
gram might summarise the present mood of many 
people, in regard to their relationships with their 
fellow-men, by saying that it is a mood of no real 
sentiment, but of much sentimentalism. Love 
of a positive order, love which cares too much for 
those whom it embraces to be afraid of plain 
dealing, love which precisely in proportion to its 
greatness refuses to be blinded to moral character 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 195 

or to ignore moral distinctions — this is a thing 
comparatively rare. Love which has sickliness 
for its most prominent feature, which deprecates 
any raising of the voice and shuts off any ex- 
pression of indignation, whatever the moral con- 
ditions may be — this love, so called, has settled 
itself in occupation of the minds and hearts of 
not a few. True sentiment towards others, which 
means a realisation that between our lives and 
those of our fellow-men a channel must be kept 
open for the passage of the emotion really called 
for by each moment as it comes, has been lost: 
sentimentalism towards others, which means that 
we must have no relation with our fellow-men 
save such as is implied in offering them sweets, 
holds the field. At all points of life the same idea 
emerges. There must be no reproof, else the 
reprover is unbrotherly. Nothing louder must 
be permitted than a very mild dissent from even 
the most obviously wrong courses. Discipline, 
whether in home, in school, or in prison, must 
have no sting. The very idea of anger or penalty 
is looked upon as belonging to a barbaric age. 
All round there is the cry for a smooth softness 
of bearing, for a general arrest of judgments, for 
a conception of mutual relationships which makes 
the suppression of all except compliment the su- 
preme duty of man. 

From our standpoint — and remembering what 



196 THE CHRISTIA^;r METHOD OF ETHICS ] 

s 

has previously been said as to the moral quahty ^ 
always inherent in love of the true order — the i 
mistake of such a spirit at once becomes clear. 
With a love that is reproduced from, or con- j 
formed to, the love in the divine life, mere senti- 
mentalism has nothing to do. As a supposed 
revelation of love, the spirit of sentimentalism is j 
nothing less than absurd. For love always con- | 
tains within itself the hope and intention of min- 
istering to the good of those loved — to their j 
good, not merely in the sense of their happiness, j 
but in the sense of their moral enrichment. Love 
does not leave the loved life alone simply because [ 
interference may hurt: before anything morally [ 
inferior in the loved, love will recognise it and i 
be roused; and any love worth the name knows 'i 
that the working out of its ideals will sometimes ) 
mean the infliction and the endurance of pain. ' 
There is a place for a right antagonism in a true i 
conception of the Christian man's relations with j 
his fellow-men. Love itself requires it. The ;■ 
Christian, amid all the movements of tenderness j 
which he will ceaselessly feel, will still be strong ; j 
and his strength will issue not from an impulse j 
contradictory of love, an impulse which divides i 
with love the empire of his nature, but from love i 
itself. It will be an essential part of love's very | 
life. ! 
If one turns to the example of Christ, love at ! 



KELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 197 

its highest is perceived to be strength no less than 
grace. He cared for peace. He came to make 
peace. Prince of peace — we are not wrong when 
we call Him by that name. But He cared only 
for the peace which follows upon the victory of 
the good ; and any peace which came from a blot- 
ting out or an ignoring of moral distinctions was 
a false peace in His eyes. We know how He 
thundered out denunciations against wrong wher- 
ever He found it, how He called men hypocrites 
when hypocrites they were. The Christ who was 
Love could sometimes wield the sword. He even 
declared that it was not peace, but the sword, that 
He was commissioned to send across the earth — 
and rightly read and understood in its proper 
connections, the saying must be taken as one of 
the clear and commanding guide-posts to an ap- 
preciation of the ministry of Christ. He took 
sometimes the high tone. And in this, as in all 
other things, it should be enough for the disciple 
that he be as his Lord. It is no proof of Christian 
grace that all men applaud our graciousness. It 
may be a sign that graciousness, as men under- 
stand it, has left no room for grace. It may be a 
far clearer token of Christian graciousness that 
certain types of character hate us. As the Christ 
Himself was first of all king of righteousness, 
and afterwards king of peace, so with the Chris- 
tian must the sequence run. Love may be the 



198 THE CHEISTIAN" METHOD OF ETHICS 



fulfilling of the law, but it is equally true that an 
assertion and an enforcement of law may some- 
times be the best fulfilment of love. And, when 
this is so, the Christian, not because he ceases to 
be love, but because love in him claims to perform 
all its tasks, must show himself to be strong. 

V 

It is true that this doctrine may be perverted 
and abused. The spirit of strength and antago- 
nism, which would rise up only on fit occasion if 
the divine life were in entire government of the 
Christian's ethical activities, may, inasmuch as 
the Christian still retains something of ethical 
initiative in his own grasp, show itself when it 
ought to sleep. Yet, if the idea of the divine 
life within, so far as the fact of it is not in being, 
be allowed to be regulative, the danger of per- 
version and abuse will at least be minimised, if 
not thrust wholly aside. The antagonism, the 
resentment, toward any man that moves in the 
life of God, could be only the jealousy of Eternal 
Holiness for itself and for its claims; and the 
antagonisms and resentments felt by the Chris- 
tian man must never be of any meaner quality 
at their heart. Christian anger, Christian resent- 
ment, will be exercised on behalf of Goodness 
and of Right alone, not on behalf of self; and 
therein will be its distinction, and thereby will it 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 199 



be kept pure. From the Christianised heart, in 
the degree in which it is really Christianised, per- 
sonal resentments drop away; and Christian an- 
tagonism toward offence goes out, not so much 
upon the person by whom the offence is wrought, 
as upon the evil by which the offence has been 
inspired, and which has for the time being taken 
possession of a human heart. He who, at the 
dictate of the true spirit, chooses the sword rather 
than peace, will be jealous, not for himself, but 
for the honour of Right in the hour when it is 
assailed, and will be foe, not to the transgressor, 
but to the spirit of evil which has made the 
transgressor its prey. And thus one comes upon 
the reconciliation, if any reconciliation be neces- 
sary, between the law of strength and the law of 
love. The true Christian antagonism, since it is 
not for himself that he who experiences it will be 
concerned, can love its enemies, be willing to 
stretch a helping hand to them when they need 
it, can bow down always in service while stead- 
fastly refusing to silence its testimony or to slur 
over the claim of Right. The truly Christian 
heart, while often accepting as a sad necessity 
its severance from some with whom it would 
fain be at one, will nevertheless keep unimpaired 
those reserves of love which will at the first 
touch of opportunity throw it back into union 
and fellowship once more. 



200 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OE ETHICS 

Treating the matter of the Christian's rela- 
tions with his fellow-men as a question of spirit- 
ual biology, relating the ideal in this matter to 
the one supreme ideal, asking how in this matter 
the Christian would act if a divine life were 
manifesting itself through and developing itself 
from the ethical activities of every hour, we reach 
then the conviction that in the Christian man 
love must be married in closest union to strength, 
that, indeed, in the Christian love and strength 
are one. 

VI 

(C) The Christian and Judgment of 
Others 

Out of what has been said arises the question 
of the Christian's judgment of others — how far 
it is permissible, on what lines it may run, what 
its limits may be. If the Christian is at any time 
to take up an attitude of unflinching antagonism 
toward his brethren or toward some quality in 
his brethren, something in the nature of estimate 
and judgment is necessarily implied. What is 
the order and rule which estimate and judgment 
are to observe? 

The first and most obvious thing to be said 
is that, when the Christian bears himself as he 
would bear himself if the divine life within pos- 



RELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 201 

sessed the entire governance of his ethical activ- 
ity, judgment of others will be a real estimate, 
not a mere process of finding fault. For it is thus, 
we know, that God's life in us, reproducing so 
far as is possible within the limitations of our 
nature the judging processes of God Himself, 
would order the matter. God takes the whole 
man into the reckoning. Judgment, with Him, 
is no mere searching for flaws. God really knows 
men. If, in the statement that God knows the 
thoughts and intents of the heart it be implied 
that He perceives all the heart's secret failings, 
it is implied also that He perceives all the heart's 
hidden good. And the Christian man has never 
a title to pounce upon a suddenly discovered fault 
or flaw in his brother, to take it as significant or 
representative of his brother's character, and 
from the single wrong conclude that he knows 
all there is to be known It is not thus that the 
divine life would act. Judgment, when the Chris- 
tian exercises it, must be estimate, " apprecia- 
tion " in the full meaning of the word,^ not a 
mere finding of fault. 

The man who claims to " know men " is in 
this matter very often at the opposite pole from 
that at which the Christian should stand. He 
who declares most loudly that he knows men gen- 

1 In the sense in which Mr. Walter Pater, for instance, 
employs the term. 



202 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

erally possesses nothing more than a keen eye 
for the faihngs of his brethren, and has no ade- 
quate conception at all of the positive elements 
out of which a complex personality is made. He 
claims — perhaps with truth — that by no one 
would he ever be taken in : he would never mis- 
take a bad man for a good, nor be blinded by a 
superficial glamour ; but that is really the sum and 
substance of the knowledge whereof he makes so 
large a boast. And it is, in truth, no knowledge 
at all. To detect the weaknesses of any character 
is most assuredly not to understand it : no char- 
acter is made up of one quality alone, whether 
that quality be bad or good ; and it is at least pos- 
sible, when the evil has been discovered, that a 
further investigation might show it to be of much 
less importance, in proportion to other things, 
than it seems to be when taken alone. To know 
a man is to weigh each element in him, not sepa- 
rately, but relatively to all the rest — to recognise 
where the morally emphatic place of his nature 
is when all the facts have been allowed for — to 
see how many votes in the government of his life 
every different quality in him possesses. He who, 
with one rapid glance, singles out the worst ele- 
ment in another, and then passes on, can make 
no claim to know his fellow-men. He has caught 
one splash of colour on the picture, and has de- 
cided that it offends his eye ; but he knows noth- 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 203 

ing of the grouping and proportion and scheme 
of the whole. He may be quite correct in his 
estimate so far as it goes; and yet the fact that 
it does not go far enough may vitiate it through 
and through. To know the worst about a man 
is not to know the man himself. And to the 
Christian man, striving to find the line on which 
his judgment of his fellows would be driven if 
it issued out of an entire surrender to the divine 
life — to him all these considerations, obvious as 
they are even on the ground of common sense, 
will appeal with tenfold power. For the divine 
life would judge, not a part of the man, but the 
whole. 

If, indeed, we apply to this matter the complete 
formula under which our thought is working, it 
will become still more evident how utterly the 
spirit of mere fault-finding fails to carry it out — 
or rather, how that spirit makes it impossible to 
carry it out at all. The divine life within is to 
manifest itself in, dictate to, and feed itself upon 
all the ethical activities of the Christian's days 
■ — the ethical activities involved in the Christian's 
relations with his fellow-men, and in his judg- 
ment of his fellow-men, among the rest. And 
the Christian, in so far as he adjusts his ethical 
activities for himself, is to adjust them as though 
this process were being carried on. But it is 
impossible for the divine life to feed itself upon, 



204 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

to develop itself through the Christian's relations 
with his fellows if, in his judgments of them, he 
has an eye only for their moral rents and scars. 
For it is implied in this attitude that he is always 
on his guard, never receptive, never susceptible 
to impression, never open to any ministry which 
might come upon him from his brethren. The 
interaction between life and life is non-existent 
for the man who is ever on the watch for fault. 
There dwells in him none of that generous will- 
ingness to receive which, no less than a generous 
willingness to bestow, is one of the marks of a 
Christian soul; and, inasmuch as he is looking 
for nothing else than evil to come from those he 
meets, he has no use for any gift of grace they 
may have to offer. He cannot be himself the 
better for his contacts with his fellow-men. As 
a matter of fact, experience and observation sup- 
ply evidence enough that the "man who knows 
men," or thinks he does, who lives without any 
real mutual relations between himself and the 
rest of the human family, becomes morally 
smaller as time goes on. He is almost always, 
from the standpoint of character, shrivelled and 
gaunt : of real moral greatness he has none, irre- 
proachable as his record may be in respect of 
actual wrong-doing ; and one knows that beneath 
the shell of this moral crustacean no sort of evo- 
lution into a higher grade of life is going on. 



RELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 205 

And the same principle holds good when it is a 
question of the distinctively Christian life, not 
the ordinary moral life alone, feeding itself upon 
and developing itself from the Christian's rela- 
tions with his brethren. Only through a judg- 
ment which seeks to see the whole, can any re- 
action of good be obtained from the character 
that is judged. If this is to be done the Chris- 
tian must make his judgment of his fellows a real 
estimate, so far as it is possible, not a mere find- 
ing of faults. It is thus that the divine life within 
him would judge; and it is thus that the divine 
life within him would establish and strengthen it- 
self through its contacts with men. It is by a 
real " appreciation " of his fellow-men that the 
Christian makes them minister to the good of 
his own inner life. The Christian, therefore, 
working by the regulative idea of the divine life 
within, treating the question of judgment as a 
question of spiritual biology, will, for the sake 
, of his own spiritual profiting, as well as for other 
reasons, reckon up men's positive qualities, or 
will endeavour so to do, and will be exercised to 
discern in others, not alone the evil, but the good 
as well. For it will be his business really to 
know men — and only in this wise can men be 
known. 



206 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



VII 

On the wider question whether the Christian 
is to be at liberty to exercise any judgment of his 
fellow-men at all, there is one decisive thing to be 
said. If his relations with his brethren are or- 
dered in part by the dominance of the divine life 
in him, and if, for the rest, he seeks to order them 
as though that dominance were complete, he will 
undoubtedly be moved at times to frame some 
verdict upon what others do. In so far as the 
very life of God occupies the field within him, 
it will be in itself a test of whatever approaches, 
and will be consciously realised as such. But, 
at the same time, the Christian, however complete 
may be his surrender to a life-power higher than 
himself, is not delivered from the limitations of 
knowledge whereby man is necessarily beset ; and 
from this fact follows the qualification that, while 
he may judge what his brethren do, a judgment 
of what they are he is never at liberty to make. 
Even a perfect dominance of his own personality 
by the Personality of God would not bestow upon 
him the final and infallible knowledge which be- 
longs to God alone. And to pronounce a verdict 
as to what his brethren, in the inner make of 
them, really are, is therefore wholly beyond his 
possibility and outside his sphere. 

The distinction between judgment of what our 



EELATION" TO FELLOW-ME^T 207 



fellow-men do and what they are is a distinction 
easily appreciated and, for that matter, easily 
kept in mind even amid the multifarious contacts 
with our brethren into which we find ourselves 
compelled to enter. Certainly it is a distinction 
which the man who strives for a really Christian- 
ised ethical ordering of his life will write clearly 
upon his heart. It is quite impossible for any 
man immersed in the common activities of com- 
mon life not to have an opinion concerning the 
worthiness or unworthiness of some particular 
concrete action which another man close at his 
side suddenly puts forth into the world to which 
they both belong. Human lives being so closely 
bound together, and what is done by one acting 
so powerfully upon other lives than that of the 
doer himself, no one can help framing some de- 
liberate estimate of his neighbour's doings as they 
emerge into the light. And, in so far as the 
divine life makes the Christian, or so far as he 
calls in the idea of an indwelling divine life to be 
regulative of his spirit and his mood, the Chris- 
tian's estimate will be legitimate and at any rate 
approximately true. This judgment — followed, 
if circumstances require, by an expression of it — 
is certainly a permissible thing. It will issue 
naturally out of the constitutive elements of the 
Christian's nature. But he who passes from a 
judgment of what his brother does to a judgment 



208 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



of what his brother is — who presumes to make, 
on the evidence which this or that action supplies, 
a final decision as to his brother's moral condition 
or status, and determines in his thought the pre- 
cise place in the moral ranks his brother is fitted 
to occupy — takes upon himself a function he has 
no qualification to. discharge. However far the 
making of the Christian by the divine life, or the 
regulative influence of its idea over him, might 
be carried, the faculty for such judgment as this 
would not be conferred: indeed, just in propor- 
tion to the extent of the divine life's sway within 
him or over him would the Christian sheer off 
from any attempt at a final reckoning up of his 
fellows, since he would have a true consciousness 
of his limitations as well as of his power. This 
arrest and limiting of judgment would issue 
naturally, as the previously mentioned positive 
judgment would issue naturally, out of the con- 
stitutive elements of the Christian's life. To es- 
timate how good a man is in himself — to assert 
that because he does this or leaves that undone 
he must be just this particular distance from the 
Kingdom of Heaven — to settle his position in 
regard to the eternal standards of character — 
shows the arrogant, censorious spirit of judgment 
to which the Christian man has no right to yield 
room. In this sense, he must not judge, lest he 
himself be judged. The Christian man will re- 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 209 



member that he knows but a few of the facts 
which go to make up his brother's moral Hfe. 
There are a thousand points he knows nothing 
about, on which he would need to be enlightened 
before he could have any just opinion concerning 
his brother's moral health. He will take into 
account the fact that a man who commits a 
wrong may be essentially better than the man 
who avoids it. He will admit his own ignorance 
as to the wrestles the erring one may have gone 
through, as to the temptations he may have en- 
dured, as to the initial inherent weaknesses of 
disposition which may have handicapped him in 
the moral race. And, remembering all these 
things, he will, while ready to declare, when the 
declaration is required, that this or that action 
is right or wrong, avoid passing an3rthing like a 
final sentence upon any transgressor or fixing 
his precise place in the moral scale. Ordering 
himself according to the conception of a divine 
life manifesting itself in all the activities involved 
in his relations with his fellow-men, the Christian 
will be frank upon what his brother does, reticent 
or &ilent upon what his brother is. For it is thus 
that the divine life, working within and through 
a human mind and heart, would have the lines of 
estimate and judgment fixed. 



310 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 
VIII 

(D) The Christian and Influence 

An integral part of the question of the Chris- 
tian's relations with his fellow-men is the matter 
of his influence upon their moral life, of the de- 
gree in which he is responsible for the exercise 
of such influence, of the method in which it 
should be put forth. Important as the matter is, 
however, it may be said that from our present 
standpoint it settles itself ; and to see that it does 
so settle itself is the best result we can reach 
through whatever study of it we may make. 
Treating it as a question of spiritual biology, 
thinking of the Christian as one in whom a divine 
life is manifesting and developing itself, one 
sees that out of the Christian an influence and a 
spiritual ministry naturally issue — not so much 
because he seeks to make them issue as be- 
cause he cannot help it. And the point for 
the Christian is not the elementary one, " How 
far am I committed to an active ministry of moral 
and spiritual benefiting towards my fellow- 
men ? " but the deeper one, " Is there going out 
from me the active ministry of moral and spiritual 
benefiting which, if I am a Christian indeed, will 
be an automatically-wrought consequence of the 
life within ? " On the point of influence, in fact. 



i 

li 



EELATIO^T TO FELLOW-MEN 211 

the Christian has not to bring what goes forth 
from him up to the measure of what, when 
judged by the measure of what is within him, he 
thinks it ought to be. He has rather to take the 
measure of what goes forth from him as the test 
and measure of what is within. 

The true Christian experience necessarily 
passes beyond the limits of him who possesses it, 
and makes an appeal to other lives. And it does 
this, as previously said, simply in virtue of what 
it is, and because the thing cannot be helped. The 
presence of a divine life in any man means that 
something distinctive begins to pervade the whole 
nature, something which, simply because it is 
there, speaks and appeals, something which be- 
comes so much a part of the man's personality 
that, wherever the personality is recognised at all, 
it is recognised also. Since personality, char- 
acter, is the one thing we are always impressing 
upon those we meet, the divinely-transfused and 
divinely-transformed personality and character 
must do a changed work and act in altered ways 
upon all around. Just in proportion as the Chris- 
tian ideal approaches fulfilment within us will it 
suggest itself in everything that passes from us; 
and as it is impossible for the sun, charged with 
light, to come within range of human vision 
without making men conscious of its shining, so 
is it in the very nature of things impossible for 



212 THE CHEISTIAN* METHOD OF ETHICS 



a nature charged with the divine life (even 
though in imperfect measure) to come within 
reach of human hearts without making them 
conscious that it is there. It is character, the 
whole moral constitution of us, that is ceaselessly 
stretching forth its many hands to touch and 
shape our fellow-men. We may know things, 
and may not open our lips to tell them : we may 
own things, and keep them back from others* 
eyes with a miser's care ; but character is the one 
thing we cannot choose but show to others, and 
the one thing which others cannot choose but see 
and feel. It is admitted by all that atmosphere — 
the strange, subtle influence which comes out of 
the depths of character, which never says any- 
thing and never does anything, but which is the 
essential revelation of personality — is a thing far 
more important and far more powerful, too, than 
definite words uttered and concrete actions done. 
Whoso is made by the divine life will carry al- 
ways with him, diffuse ceaselessly around him, 
an atmosphere which must be felt. Even with 
other things it is so. Your man of refined and 
lofty pursuits and interests — your cultured man 
— bears with him his atmosphere. He is not al- 
ways talking learnedly, or actually unloading his 
own intellectual goods in order to bestow them 
upon less favoured minds; but the culture which 
makes him shows itself in almost his lightest 



KELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 213 

word — a thing not to be defined, but clear enough 
all the same. The suggestion of culture leaps 
from him, let the immediate matter be what it 
may. How much more must it be so with those 
who are in true submission to the life of God. 
The divine life possessing a man must make all 
life a suggestion of divineness; and the divine 
atmosphere — if it be in the house of character 
at all — must fill even the commonest room. Like 
that subtle chemistry the ancient sages sought for, 
which, had it been found, would have trans- 
muted all common metal into gold, so the divine 
life within a man must make life's commonest 
contents shine before the eyes of men with some- 
thing of a golden heavenly glow. 

Certainly in the earthly life of Christ Him- 
self (and, as was said, we find Him in a very 
intimate way to be our example throughout the 
whole of this realm) things were so. Just be- 
cause He was what He was. He pressed cease- 
lessly upon men the appeal of another life and 
another world. It was not that Christ had some- 
thing special within Him which He revealed now 
and again and then hid away once more: He 
had been so sent by the Father that out of the 
very make of His being the missionary appeal 
and the ministering testimony came forth. When 
He spoke, and not less when He was silent — 
when He laid men under the spell of astonish- 



214 THE CHEISTIAN" METHOD OF ETHICS 

ment by some marvellous work, and not less when i 
He permitted His power to lie in rest — always 
and unintermittently He was, simply by the life in , 
Him which could not be hid, suggesting, persuad- ; 
ing, warning, presenting life's finer ideals, and I 
wooing men thereto. His very silences must 
have been eloquent: His very presence, though 
it did nothing but pass by swiftly and quietly and | 
go as a breath is gone, must have been so spirit- \ 
ually fragrant that none could choose but heed. ; 
And as the Father sent Him, so would He send \ 
His own. He, bringing into us the life of God | 
which dwelt in Him — He, making us one with 
Himself as He Himself was one with God — 
would have us to be so re-made through that 
union that there shall be a positive and unmistak- j 
able suggestion of higher life emanating from j 
us, be our outward attitude and occupation for i 
the moment what they may ; and He would have 
His disciples be surrounded always by a spiritual j 
halo which shall speak to men about, and appeal \ 
to men on behalf of, heaven and goodness and 
God. 

It is from this point, and along this line, that 
the Christian should approach the question of his 
influence upon his fellow-men. It is not so much 
that he has to make or create an influence by some 1 
effort of his own. The point is rather that by 
the influence he is actually exerting without any ■ 



EELAl'ION TO FELLOW-MEN" 215 



effort of his own he may test his own measure 
of divine life. It is not putting the matter 
strongly enough to say that he who is truly a 
Christian will be moved to go forth and touch 
the world with what influence he can. It is not 
the consequence of being a Christian, but actually 
a part of it, to diffuse what is received over those 
who have it not. The Christian needs first of all 
to approach the matter of influence in indirect 
fashion — to remind himself that it is in the auto- 
matic influence of character that he ought, in 
the nature of the case, to be most rich. He has 
to remember that just as the lamp becomes incan- 
descent when the electric current passes through, 
so, without effort, must character become spirit- 
ually incandescent when the divine life passes 
along all its fibres. And, for the rest — when he 
remembers that only in limited degree does the 
divine life possess him and make its appeal 
through him- — he will at least endeavour to ap- 
peal to his brethren by an ever-quickened longing 
for a deeper experience (since this, like the deeper 
experience itself, cannot be hid, and is one of 
the most penetrating spiritual ministries in all 
the world), and, if he cannot speak to men 
through the beauty of holiness, will speak to them 
/hrough the beauty of a desire after holiness 
which is at least in process of being fulfilled. 



216 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



IX 

The correlative suggestion, along this line of 
thought, is a suggestion as to the effect which the 
Christian may expect his influence to have upon 
those who come beneath its sway. His influence, 
as we have seen, is primarily the influence of 
character, of life; and it is upon character and 
life that character and life will do their work. 
That is, the Christian is not necessarily to in- 
fluence other people in the direction of ordering 
the external activities of their lives for them, 
but in the direction of suggesting a spirit which 
will enable them to order their own. The Chris- 
tian, treating the question of his influence upon 
others as a question of spiritual biology, must be 
content to forego the pleasure (as human nature 
holds it) of bringing other lives into an outward 
conformity with the pattern of his, and be satis- 
fied with bringing near to other lives a spirit and 
a life which, when his brethren receive it, must 
be left to work itself out in them as it will. 

It is probably a native instinct with the ma- 
jority of men to want to give actual detailed ad- 
vice or instruction to other people, and to reckon 
the amount of influence they are exerting by the 
degree in which they can succeed in bringing 
other minds to accept their doctrines, or in get- 
ting other courses of action discarded in favour 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 217 

of their own. Yet to lay too much stress on the 
measure in which these results are attained is to 
confuse a spirit with the effects worked out by the 
spirit; and it is surely a far greater and nobler 
thing to call a right spirit — the spirit of love for 
the divine life and of consecration to the divine 
life — to call that into being within another nature^ 
even though that spirit should choose for the 
manifesting of itself ways that are not ours, than 
to obtain a mere mechanical conformity of an- 
other's action and opinion with our own. The 
influence of character upon character is one of the 
greatest things this world contains: the quicken- 
ing of a right spirit in another man is a better 
thing than the mere instructing him as to what, 
in this emergency or in that, he is to do ; and this 
is the task which is committed to the Christian's 
charge. It is thus that the Christian's commis- 
sion must be read. He has, with the character 
in him transformed, with the atmosphere that 
makes him re-created out of holier elements — he 
has so to reveal the transformed character that 
those whose character is yet untransformed may 
realise the miserable sordidness of theirs, so to 
diffuse the re-created atmosphere of personality 
that others shall feel how much is lacking to the 
sweetness of theirs. Not to make others do as 
he does, but to make them see something in the 
life out of which his doing springs — that is the 



218 THE CHEISTIAX METHOD OF ETHICS 



Christian's line. Not to influence others in the 
sense of causing them to take his external activi- 
ties for a model to be reproduced point by point, 
but to influence others in the sense of convincing 
them that the inward sources whence the activities 
come are purer than any they possess — that is 
the Christian's line. And let it be added that in 
this view the hope of influencing others becomes 
possible for all. We cannot always advise others, 
or instruct others, so complex and various are 
the circumstances into which any one may find 
himself thrown, and so little may we be able to 
grasp the conditions among which our brother 
has to thread his way; but the suggestion of a 
right spirit can always go forth from us to strug- 
gling spirits near by. In this way, the smallest 
life, the life which in one sense knows the least, 
may give impulse to the life that is greatest and 
the life that knows the most. 

One sums up the matter by saying that the 
influence of the divine life, acting through the 
Christian man, is simply in the direction of sug- 
gesting the necessity for an in-dwelling of the 
divine to the Christian's fellow-men. So does the 
ideal of the Christian's ministry shape itself — 
and brief as the expression of it is. no nobler ideal 
could be. For as we remember that He who said, 
" I am the light of the world," said also to His 
disciples, " Ye are the light of the w^orld," and as 



EELATION TO FELLOW-MEN 319 

we ask ourselves how this thing can be — that we 
should be what the Master was — we see that it 
can be only in this way. But in this way it can be. 
By our suggestion of the divine life as the su- 
premely necessary thing, we begin the shining 
into other lives of that Light which has shone 
into our own, content, thereafter — if we be dis- 
ciples indeed — to let other lives be kindled, not at 
the light in us, but at the Light whence our own 
is derived. It is by caring before all things that 
his influence shall be an influence of character 
upon character that the Christian does what he 
can to bring human lives into contact with and 
submission to the life divine. 



VIII 



THE CHRISTIAN AND DISCIPLINE 

UPON our present line of thought, the ques- 
tion of the Christian's relation to the sorrow 
and pain of life — to the whole sum of experi- 
ences which goes under the name of life's disci- 
pline — ^becomes a part of the ethical scheme. The 
Christian's concern is no longer about compen- 
sation for, but about obligation in, the seemingly 
sadder elements of his lot. It is not from the 
ethical standpoint that this topic is usually ap- 
proached; and yet it is inevitable that it should 
be so approached, if the regulative principle by 
which we are working be applied all round the 
circle of life. There is to be, in the Christian 
man, a divine life manifesting itself in, dictating 
to, and developing itself from, all his relations 
with the world and with the life coming to him 
through those relations: he is at least to adjust 
himself as though this were being done ; and this 
programme is not fulfilled for him unless, while 
he passes along life's darker valleys and rougher 
roads, he bears himself as one who not only 
endures, but conquers, as one who not only comes 
sso 



THE CHEISTIAN AND DISCIPLINE 221 



out unscathed, but as one who is in truth the 
greater and the better for the journeying that 
was superficially so hard. Clearly, it is on the 
fact that the divine life is to develop itself from 
the Christian's connection with all that befalls, 
that the emphasis must in this connection be laid ; 
for the only action the Christian can take in re- 
gard to the heavier experiences of life is to se- 
cure whatever reaction of good they are able to 
afford. And, when he asks himself what his at- 
titude is to be amid these things, the Christian 
must therefore put the inquiry as one that bears, 
not so much upon a comforting for which he 
hopes, as upon a duty which he has to discharge. 
It is, in fact, as we shall presently have occasion 
to repeat, because Christian men and women so 
often approach the matter from the idea of conso- 
lation for trouble rather than from that of duty 
in trouble, that consolation itself fails to arrive. 
Applying our regulative formula, we see at once 
that the question of the Christian's attitude to- 
ward sorrow and pain belongs to the range of 
questions embraced in the Christian ethical 
scheme. And it is no superfluous thing to re- 
cover into the ethical atmosphere and to the 
ethical plane an aspect of the Christian life 
that is treated too often from lower points of 
view. 

How, then, from this standpoint, is the Chris- 



222 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

tian to bear himself when life's clouds gather and 
upon life's ways the going is rough? 

I 

He must, for the first and primary thing, recog- 
nise the positiveness of all the experiences of his 
days. He must hold that every experience, what- 
ever its outward aspect may be, is not something 
lying outside the directly elevating ministries of 
life, only brought within them, if at all, by a 
sort of corrective exercise of God's power, but is 
in itself the direct offer of a gift. For this, surely, 
is how the divine life, dwelling within man and 
ordering all man's attitudes and moods, would 
view the diversified stretches of experience: it 
would look on all things as welcome, as positive 
in their actual offers and in their possible effects ; 
and it would be, not defensive, but aggressive and 
eager, in regard to all. And to this method, con- 
sequently, must the Christian conform. 

Commonly, we fail to attain to the height of 
such a spirit as this. We tend to assume that 
only one part of life arrives straight from God, 
and with God's direct commission to bless: the 
other part, although it may, by some sudden ex- 
ercise of God's almighty power, be prevented 
from hurting us, really comes with an originally 
hostile possibility and intent: what is obviously 
pleasant and enriching we recognise as such, and 



THE CHEISTIAN" AND DISCIPLINE 223 



say " This is God's gift " ; but the rest— the ex- 
periences which visit us without a smile upon 
their faces and wearing perhaps a look of mys- 
tery which we cannot penetrate — the rest, how- 
ever God may subsequently turn its harmful 
power aside, is not primarily a minister of grace. 
A portion of our living of direct sacred origin, 
and a portion of an origin that is not sacred — 
so our fancy shapes it; and if only that which is 
not of immediate heavenly birth can be prevented 
from poisoning us with its baneful influences, 
there is no more for which we can hope. Our 
faith — what there is of it — gets on the defensive 
so quickly, when there arrives some experience 
which does not seem at once to fling forth its 
benediction into our grasp; and, while we will- 
ingly receive one section of life, our prayer is to 
be saved from the other. The divine positiveness 
of life we do not always apprehend. 

The true Christian attitude is a much more 
strenuous and a much larger thing. That no ele- 
ment of life needs to be a wasted thing for him, 
barren of any inspiring suggestion or unable to 
enrich — still more, that no element of life can 
be in reality opposed to him, an enemy from 
whom he runs away to hide in coward fear or 
whom he entreats the power of Heaven to smite 
down before too much harm be done — that ex- 
pectancy will find an answer in every single thing 



224 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



which befalls — that all the hands with which ex- 
perience touches him are hands stretched out, not 
to take away, but to give — these are the certain- 
ties which should be ceaselessly ringing, like peals 
of joyous music, in the Christian's ears. Never 
is it to be his request that this or that should pass 
him by, lest the burden of it prove greater than 
he can bear: rather is he to embrace and wel- 
come and snatch at every new offer that experi- 
ence makes, strange and mysterious though it be, 
sure that it contains within it some golden treas- 
ure it must yield up. And not that he may be 
able to endure life's darker visitations without 
repining — not so should he shape, not to that 
should he limit, his prayer. But that he may 
grow the richer through them all, since that is 
not too great a miracle — that is to be his hope 
and aim. Not content is he to be with the merely 
negative good of not being the worse for aught 
he goes through, but resolved upon the positive 
good of being better made, better built up, better 
endowed, by it all. And his faith is to possess 
sufficient quality and sufficient heat and sufficient 
glow and spring to assure him of this — that all 
life can be made to respond to nis positive ex- 
pectation with positive gifts. 

That is the Christian attitude. And it is an 
attitude, be it remembered, which as a matter of 
duty the Christian is called upon to take up, since 



THE CHRISTIAN" AND DISCIPLINE 225 

the regulative idea for him is that the divine Hfe 
is to manifest itself in and to develop itself 
through his connection with all that befalls. 

II 

Emphasis must be laid, however, upon the fact 
that it is good of the spiritual order — an actual 
development of the life within — that the Chris- 
tian is to look for as the result of his severer 
experiences; and he is not rightly adjusted to 
these experiences until it is on gain of this kind 
that he is bent. The divine life is to develop it- 
self from all the passing incidents of the Chris- 
tian's experience — that is, the Christian is to be 
better, rather than happier (except, of course, 
in so far as to be better always means to be hap- 
pier in the long run) for all he goes through. 
And this brings us again to the point previously 
made — that the inquiry as to a right attitude in 
trial must be taken as bearing, not so much upon 
a comforting for which the Christian hopes, as 
upon a duty which the Christian has to discharge. 
And it is through our forgetfulness of this that 
even the comforting for which we look frequently 
fails to come. 

The classic passage in the New Testament 
brings out clearly the fact that it is for a spiritual 
profiting out of trouble that the Christian is to 
be chiefly concerned. " We know that to them 



1 
1 

226 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS ; 

that love God all things work together for good," ] 
the Apostle Paul declares in tones of ringing 

triumph ; ^ and the many who quote the words i 

so insistently should at least be sure that they | 

quote them in the sense in which they were first | 

employed. Out of the significance suggested by j 
the word " good " the moral and spiritual element 

must on no account be dropped, if the phrases of i 

victory are to be used as Paul used them — for, j 

indeed, the moral and spiritual element is the j 

chiefest thing of all. It is not primarily good in ■ 

the sense of happiness, but good in the sense of j 

the morally and spiritually good, that all things ' 

are to work. The apostle is really stating in j 

other language that the divine life in the Chris- \ 

tian man is to develop itself from all the Christian 1 

man goes through, is, in brief, stating our regu- i 

lative principle in this particular one of its appli- ' 

cations. If one needs evidence that this interpre- ' 

tation is the interpretation consonant with the | 

apostle's intention, one can find it, first, in the ; 

particular Greek word employed ; and next, in the | 

fact that Paul immediately passes on to supply '. 

a clear indication of his meaning by speaking \ 

about being "conformed to the image of the ! 

Son." i 

We get at the precise meaning of Paul's utter- | 

ance, consequently, if we render it " to them that < 
love God all things work together for goodness." 

I 

1 Romans viii. 28. 



THE CHRISTIAI^ AND DISCIPLmE 227 



There is, or ought to be, for the Christian man, 
a spiritual education in all and a spiritual profiting 
to be obtained from all; and the purpose which 
life through all its range can be made to serve by 
those that have the true spirit in them is the pur- 
pose of enlarging their hearts' endowment of all 
that is worthy and noble and true. And it is for 
this gain out of seeming loss that the Christian 
man should ceaselessly look. 

The Christian attitude toward sorrow, pain, 
disappointment, loss, and all the other constituents 
of " discipline," is not truly taken until this is 
realised. The true Christian attitude is certainly 
not taken when Christian men and women look 
for some magic to be worked in life for them 
whereby all these darker experiences will be made 
in themselves different things for them from what 
they are for other people. Even the Christian 
mind so often translates " good," in the classic 
passage referred to, as if it meant " pleasantness " 
rather than " worth." All things are to make for 
our good — that is, we are going to find, now or 
later, something pleasant come out of them for 
us, spite of the unpleasantness which at the im- 
mediate moment they bring. They really make for 
our good — that is, the Christian man ought not 
to feel hurt when these things strike him; and if 
he could only rise to his privileges, he would find 
their severity to be only a phantom of his imagi- 



228 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

nation. He does not, of course, formulate in set 
words any such ideas ; but in his heart he carries 
a vague notion that the Christian disciple ought 
to find no meaning in the words sorrow and dis- 
appointment and bereavement and pain: some- 
how, through God's manipulation of them for 
him, their essential character should be trans- 
formed. And, as was said, it is precisely because 
the wrong expectation is entertained that expec- 
tation goes unfulfilled. The Christian man finds 
that grief approaches with as swift a step as ever, 
that sorrow spares not a single stroke, that the 
shadow cast by death's wing is still as wide and 
deep. 

He cannot take in his hand anything that has 
resulted from all he has gone through, and say 
" This is the promised good." He has mis-read 
the requirements of the position — mis-read the 
promise of it too; and hence his disappointment 
comes. He had no title to anticipate that when 
his trial was over he would be able to reckon 
things out and find that there was a larger balance 
of pleasantness than there was before the trial 
began. All this is far from the attitude prescribed 
by the idea that a divine life is to manifest itself 
in and develop itself through the Christian's con- 
tact with the harder elements of his lot. It is to 
good in the sense of spiritual enrichment, of 
character-growth, of soul-sweetening and of 
greatening and purifying of the heart — it is to 



THE CHRISTIAN AND DISCIPLINE 229 

that the conception points. And it is to this 
gain, and this gain alone, or at any rate this gain 
primarily — leaving gain of all other kind to come, 
if it come at all, incidentally and by the way — 
that the Christian who rightly adjusts his mood 
and attitude among the heavier passages of life 
will direct his expectant gaze. Living by the 
one regulative idea, he will pass through all fair 
fields of joy if there his path shall lead him, and 
through dreary wastes of sorrow if that be the 
appointed lot, and through the very valley of the 
shadow of death at last, as one resolved that 
through it all the heart shall be made truer and 
character shall grow. And this is the attitude, 
let it be said once more, which as a matter of duty 
the Christian is called upon to take up, since the 
regulative idea for him is that the divine life is to 
manifest itself in and to develop itself through 
his connection with all that befalls. 

Ill 

But it may be asked whether it is really possible 
for the Christian man to preserve, amid the 
darker experiences of his days, such an attitude 
that these experiences shall be compelled to min- 
ister to his spiritual good. Of course the divine 
life within him, did it possess all its power, would 
secure the desired end ; but, in so far as the thing 
is a matter of self-adjustment, so far as the Chris- 



230 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

tian still has to order his ethical activities for him- 
self, how is he to become the spiritual master of 
his lot? 

The answer can be given, in connection with 
this particular department of the Christian ethical 
order, as it was given to similar questions in other 
departments before. In the Christian man, the 
wish to set himself as God's Hfe within would 
set him if it had all its will, has a dynamic force 
that makes for its own fulfilment; and he who 
desires to be morally and spiritually the better 
for the discipline he goes through cannot fail to 
find his desire crowned. And, indeed, in this 
particular instance it is easy to see that it must be 
so. To say that he who wants to grow through 
experience is sure to do so, is but to enunciate in 
other terms the constant law that all life tends to 
feed and to confirm whatever is the ruling ele- 
ment in a man's character, the law which is 
always being proved in a thousand instances be- 
fore every observant eye. The effect which the 
experiences of life produce in us depends upon 
that in us with which they come in contact: 
there is not a single joy and not a single sorrow 
which affects two people in precisely the same 
way : the nature in them takes up the experience 
as it comes, is worked upon by the experience and 
itself works upon the experience, and strengthens 
itself in whatever its dominant quality may have 



THE CHEISTIAN AND DISCIPLINE 231 

been by the experience as it passes by. The pre- 
dominantly mean and ignoble man will rise for a 
moment to sun-lit heights of joy, and the joy 
will only minister to his meanness : or he will be 
clasped for a moment in the arms of sorrow, and 
the sorrow will but fling him out of its embrace 
presently meaner and more ignoble still. The 
predominantly great-souled man will climb to 
those same summits of joy and submit himself 
to the clasp of that same sorrow, and will come 
down from the mount of delight and emerge 
from the embrace of grief with a yet more ful- 
filled greatness in him, with the moral quality of 
his being strengthened and confirmed. And in the 
classic Pauline passage just now referred to, the 
apostle is really basing himself upon this unalter- 
able law. " We know that to them that love God 
all things work together for good." It is not sim- 
ply a categorical statement which Paul had him- 
self accepted, and which he desired his readers to 
accept, in a spirit of unquestioning faith. It is the 
summing up of an argument which Paul has at 
the moment no time to draw out in its fulness. 
The reasoning behind the assertion — the reason- 
ing implied, though not expressed — is that love or 
desire is a power which forces all life and experi- 
ence into the service of its own ideals, and that 
love, directed upon God, must, therefore, force 
all life and experience into the service of good- 



232 THE CHRISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

ness. Which is but another method of saying 
that all experience feeds and strengthens the 
moral quality and desire which has been upper- 
most within. All things work together for mean- 
ness to him who loves what is mean. All things 
work together for greatness to him who loves 
what is great. The Christian, as he seeks to ad- 
just himself in the true attitude amid the disci- 
plinary trials of his life, and wonders how he 
may make sure of not missing the discipline, may 
rest in hope upon the law. His desire for it 
tends unfailingly to fulfil itself. The love of good 
is the love of God — and to them that love God 
and good all things work together for good. 
They meet the sorrow which would narrow and 
belittle another, and, because care for nobleness 
is supreme in them, the sorrow works out in noble- 
ness. They are touched, as others are, by the 
finger of pain, and, though to them pain is pain 
still, the soul takes no hurt thereby, but, because 
care for all great qualities is supreme in it, grows 
the greater for the very pain. He who keeps the 
love of good alive in all its strength — who keeps 
the heart aspiring toward good with all its power 
— who keeps the passion for good palpitating 
through every fibre of his moral being — will find 
that to his predominant love of good all life, 
whether for the moment it wear its robes of 
gladness or its sombre garb of grief, whether it 



THE CHEISTIAN AND DISCIPLINE 233 

come with gifts in its hand or with a sword to 
destroy what he has held most dear, will answer 
with the longed-for good. In this, as in all else 
— and in this realm perhaps more obviously than 
in many others — the wish to set ourselves as the 
divine life within would set us if it had all its will, 
has a dynamic force that makes for its own fulfil- 
ment. And in that unalterable law the Christian 
of true and earnest purpose may rest. 

IV 

In one way, this particular application of the 
Christian ethical method enables the Christian to 
test himself, his own spirit, his own depth of 
Christian temper and mood. The degree in which 
the thought of a spiritual profiting through trial 
appeals to us may be taken as a test of what we 
are. The Christian man may well ask himself 
whether he cares enough about being made good 
to be satisfied with the assurance that to that end 
all things are tending if he will have it so. Or 
does he want to fall back upon the meaner 
" good," and have God weigh out to him enough 
of pleasantness to make up for what he goes 
through? He may be sure, of course — even as 
the apostle, austerely bent upon spiritual ideals as 
he was, would have avowed himself sure — that at 
the long last there would be pleasures for ever- 
more at God's right hand, that in heaven the per- 



234 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS \ 

feet gladness on whose face he never looks for i 

more than a moment here will lift up the light of i 

its countenance upon him ceaselessly, that there j 

his buried delights will rise from their graves and I 

come to meet him in all the glory of resurrection, | 

that there his heart, which has hoped only to find j 

hope's blossom wither in the east winds and which ] 

has aspired only to droop wearily, will be satis- ' 

fied, that there all the discords change to sweet- { 

est music, that there his dear dead ones will be ^ 

folded once more in his arms. But he must ' 
know, also, that all this is, in its fulness at any 

rate, only for those who care for the higher j 

"good" most and first. Is he content that it j 

should be so? Or does he want to bargain that j 

for every treasure taken from him he shall be \ 

paid back in similar kind? By the answer his | 

heart gives, he may test his spiritual quality and ) 

his Christian rank. 1 

At any rate, it is to this distinctively ethical | 

view of life's experience, and of their true atti- ] 

tude beneath it, that Christian men and women I 

need to come back. They must rise beyond those j 

exercises of faith which simply declare that trial • 
is God's will, that for all the hardship of life 

they will be amply repaid in the end, that things 1 

are better than they seem. They must set them- : 

selves to making life's harder elements a disci- ! 
pline indeed — a positive ministry of positive 



THE CHEISTIAN AND DISCIPLINE 235 



good. They must recover into the ethical atmos- 
phere and to the ethical plane this department of 
the Christian life which has too often been 
treated from a lower point of view. And it is 
as a matter of absolute duty, let it be repeated, 
that this is to be done; for the regulative idea 
for the Christian man is that the divine life within 
him is to manifest itself in and to develop itself 
from all that befalls. 



IX 



SUMMARY— THE INCLUSIVE RULE 

TT is not necessary to pursue the application 
of the general ethical method of Christianity 
into other departments of Christian practice. 
iWhat has been said as to the Christian's relations 
with the world, the Christian's relations with his 
fellow-men, and the Christian's bearing under the 
discipline of life, will serve as sufficient illustra- 
tion, and will enable the reader to see how in 
other spheres the same principles may be worked 
out. As in the spheres dealt with, so in all the 
rest, there is to be the governing fact — or, in so 
far as that fails, the governing idea — of a divine 
life manifesting itself in, dictating to, and devel- 
oping itself from, the ethical situation in all cir- 
cumstances that may arise. We pass at the close 
to see if there be for the Christian man any in- 
clusive rule in which all that has hitherto been 
said may be gathered up. 

I 

Before doing this, however, it will be as well 
to recapitulate briefly the attained results of our 
thought. And it is thus the summary will rua 

236 



SUMMAEY— THE INCLUSIVE EULE 237 

The ultimate ethical ideal, according to Chris- 
tianity, is not that a man should know how to 
bear himself in any crisis of experience, and 
should act out his knowledge, but that 'he should 
bear himself rightly without thinking about it — 
almost as if he could not help it: in the final 
condition to which the Christian scheme looks 
forward, the moralist is lost in the saint. The 
distinctly religious programme of Christianity, 
both in what it prescribes as the sum total of 
man's spiritual adjustment, and in the subor- 
dinate and temporary programme which it im- 
poses in the absence of the perfect thing, keeps 
this ultimate ethical ideal in view; and in so far 
as man pursues the religious programme, he pur- 
sues ethical perfection too. Even in its lower 
and intermediate stages, the Christian programme 
views the inner religious life and the outer prac- 
tical life as in closest relationship, and presents 
man as being ceaselessly engaged in a spiritual 
development that is going on- within — a spiritual 
development that must have ethical consequences 
— and as reaching forth to life's ethical problems 
only out of that development, in such fashion 
as that development prescribes. The relation 
which is absolute unity at the highest stage of 
Christian experience is at least to be maintained 
as action and reaction while the lower stages are 
passed through. As a matter of fact, however, 



238 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



the Christian is compelled to attack many ethical 
problems as it were in themselves — not primarily 
in their relation to his inner spiritual life, and out 
of his consciousness of his inner spiritual life, 
but rather as separate objects in the field of ex- 
perience ; and hence he needs some further guide. 
The daily programme for him, therefore, as the 
practical problems come knocking at his door, is 
this. He must, at each emerging crisis, realise 
himself afresh on the side of bemg, call on the 
divine life within him, in its actuality and in its 
potentiality, to become regnant over the position, 
so that it shall be, not he, but God present in him 
through Christ, that deals with the question and 
decides the way. And by this is not meant simply 
an effort of imagination : what is meant is rather 
an actual movement of the Christianas own life 
and of the Christ-life within him, a movement 
that swings each to its proper place, bringing the 
Christ-activity, in place of the Christian's self- 
activity, to the directive post which it ought 
always to have, but from which the too assertive 
self-hood of the Christian man frequently keeps 
it away. So far as possible, it is the actual divine 
life within the Christian that is to direct and rule ; 
and the Christian must, at the coming of every 
practical question, so re-adjust himself spiritually 
that this may be. The function of conscience in 
the Christian man is to proclaim whether or no 



SUMMAEY— THE INCLUSIVE EULE 239 

this has in any particular instance been done. 
Yet, when it is done, surrender to the divine Hfe 
is still incomplete: the fact of the divine life is 
not entirely regnant as it ought to be ; and some- 
thing of initiative yet remains in the Christian's 
hands. For the right guidance and ordering of 
this, he is to call upon the idea of the divine life 
within, and is in all things to control his ways 
as he believes the divine life within would control 
them if it had all its power — his reckoning out of 
his conclusions being at least in measure guarded 
from error, inasmuch as the divine life does truly 
make and constitute him in part. He has but to 
make an extension for himself in thought of a 
line which experience has already begun to draw. 
He is to treat every practical problem as a prob- 
lem of spiritual biology. So is the relation be- 
tween the inner life and the outer still maintained. 
So does the Christian, in even the smallest con- 
cerns of life, relate the ideals to the ideal. That, 
dealing with practical questions thus, he may 
sometimes come to conclusions similar to those 
reached by other ethical methods, we have seen. 
But for him the whole thing will be rationalised : 
the precepts by which he lives will stand upon a 
different and a definite basis, will be no longer 
arbitrary or disjointed, but will be realised as 
organically bound up with the spiritual processes 
which constitute the Christian's true life, and 



240 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

will in consequence be more binding and more 
energising by far. And, to what was previously 
said about the action of conscience in deciding 
whether, in every practical crisis, the Christian 
has, so far as he could, substituted the decisions 
and activity of the divine life within him for the 
decisions and activity of the self in him, it may 
now be added that conscience supplements this 
ministry by declaring whether, in the absence of 
the perfect regulation by the fact of the divine 
life, the idea has been duly called upon to rule. 
Once again, the formula may be set down. The 
Christian man has to remember that, according 
to the proper ordering of things, the divine life is 
to manifest itself in, dictate to, and feed itself 
upon, the ethical activities of every hour; and in 
his own ordering of things, so far as any remains 
to him, he must act as if this, and this alone, were 
being done. 

II 

But if it be said that all this seems to make the 
Christian ordering of life too complicated a thing, 
and that on this method Christian ethics becomes 
too stringent a task, what answer can be given? 
If some simpler statement of the Christian ethical 
programme be demanded, can one be found? 
One might say, of course, that the suggested 
programme is after all not so complicated as it 



SUMMAEY— THE INCLUSIVE EULE 241 

appears, and that the processes of ethical adjust- 
ment here prescribed are, like a good many other 
processes of the moral and spiritual life, accom- 
plished as it were in one flashing movement of 
heart and mind, although many slow movements 
of speech be needed to set them out. But, in 
point of fact, a simpler statement of the Christian 
ethical method is at hand, though only now, at 
the end of our previous thinking, could it be 
properly made or understood — a statement in 
which all other things are embraced, a statement 
which may be taken as the inclusive rule for the 
Christian's conduct amid the practical concerns 
of life. 

At each emergence of crisis, the Christian must \ 
call up the living presence of the living Christ, ' 
and submit himself to its spelL So the inclusive 
statement will run. It may be objected that this 
is merely one of the commonplace phrases of a 
fervent and unthinking evangelicalism, and 
scarcely gives out the ring of a serious treatment 
of the important theme at present in hand. 
One of the phrases of a fervent evangeli- 
calism it may be; but it is certainly none the 
worse, no less appropriate and suggestive, for 
that ; and it is certainly the phrase which precisely 
describes the one necessary thing. And, at the 
point we have reached, though perhaps only at 
that point, it can be adopted with discernment 



242 THE CHEISTIAN" METHOD OF ETHICS 

of its significance, and without risk of the mis- 
understanding, or the inadequate understanding, 
of it into which a fervent evangehcalism some- 
times falls. 

It is true that something like "realising the 
presence of the living Christ," " entering into 
communion with Christ," " going out to Christ 
in submission and faith," is often advocated as 
the solution of the Christian's ethical perplexities 
by many who give no rational account of the way 
in which ethical assistance is supposed to be de- 
rived from the process, and who indeed almost 
resent the suggestion that any rational account 
of it can be given. And the process itself is often 
conceived as if it were merely an emotional 
recognition of the fact that Christ is near — a 
mysterious ethical dynamic following, in some 
thaumaturgical fashion, upon the emotion's 
birth. By this emotional recognition the Chris- 
tian conscience is supposed to be quickened, the 
good more clearly discerned, the impulse toward 
it made to beat with redoubled speed and power ; 
and in proportion as the Christian works himself 
into warmth of feeling before the present Christ, 
finds himself up-lifted into something like rap- 
turous delight, ethical possibilities are enlarged. 
But the rationale of the supposed ethical enlarge- 
ment is too seldom apprehended, however ear- 
nestly the need of realising the presence of the liv- 



SUMMARY— THE INCLUSIVE EULE 243 

ing Christ be pressed; and perhaps it is not un- 
just to say that, in many presentations of the 
matter, the radical flaw lies in attaching more 
importance to what goes out to the Christ from 
the Christian than upon what comes down upon 
the Christian from the Christ. " The apprehen- 
sion of the living Christ " is the phrase ; but the 
accent falls upon apprehension rather than upon 
Christ. And the apprehension is taken almost as 
a piece of magic whereby the Christian is enabled 
to overcome ethical difficulties which were too 
much for him before. 

At the point to which our thought has led us, 
we can employ the phrase just given as embody- 
ing the inclusive ethical rule, with an adequate 
apprehension of its meaning, and with an ade- 
quate apprehension of its reasonableness besides. 
The Christian, at each emergence of crisis, is to 
call up the living presence of the living Christ, and 
to submit himself to its spell. What is meant is 
that, whenever problems of practice press, the 
Christian is to realise the living Christ, the Christ 
in whom the actual dynamic of the divine life 
always dwells as close at hand, and is to let the 
dynamic issuing from that Christ take grip upon 
him afresh. It is not a matter of thinking about 
Christ as He was till the historic Christ seems 
to project a vision of Himself upon the canvas 
of the present moment and to stretch a hand 



244 THE CHEISTIAN" METHOD OF ETHICS 

down across the years. It is not a matter of 
working up warmth of heart and mind and soul 
before a sort of vividly-imagined Christ, till the 
vividly-imagined Christ reacts with beneficial 
inspirations upon the heart and mind and soul 
which have imagined Him. It is not a matter 
of realising Christ as if He were here. It is a 
matter of knowing that just as I am here, so He 
is here, with life in Himself and with the creative 
power toward me implied in that word — and a 
matter of permitting His creative personality to 
enfold my own. The Christian, at his hours of 
ethical stress, is to realise the living presence of 
the living Christ. 

And the reasonableness of this as a method of 
mastering the ethical crises of life is easily seen. 
It is strictly in line with all that has been said 
before. What the Christian has to do, we have 
seen, when the problems of conduct present them- 
selves, is to set himself in such an inward atti- 
tude that the divine life within him may win in- 
crease of power and may take governance of the 
situation with which the Christian himself knows 
not how to deal. But it is through the Christ — 
through the dynamic of the living Christ — that 
the divine life will win that increase of power, 
just as it was through the dynamic of the living 
Christ that the divine life in the Christian first 
began; and to say that the Christian is to set 



SUMMAEY— THE INCLUSIVE EULE 245 j 

himself in such an inward attitude as shall secure | 
for the divine life within him increase of power 
is but to say in other words that he needs to sub- | 
ject himself anew to the magnetism and mastery | 
of the living Christ. The Christian surmounts | 
his practical problems, therefore, by calling up \ 
the living presence of the living Christ, and sub- ; 
mitting himself to its spell. It is no piece of emo- ] 
tionalism that is thus advocated : it is no thauma- 
turgical device that is thus relied upon: it is 
actually the scientific method — one need not fear 
to put it so — of grappling with the ethical diffi- 
culties of life, this method that is here set down. j 
Or if we pass to the further point of the pro- 
gramme previously drawn up — that the Chris- i 
tian, in so far as the fact of the divine life fails j 
to be completely regulative of his ethical activ- i 
ities, is to summon the idea of it as a supple- ] 
mentary regulative power — we can similarly de- l 
clare that by calling up the living presence of the i 
living Christ and submitting himself to its spell, \ 
the Christian carries the programme through. | 
The Christian's own thinking about the true ] 
course — his own effort to ascertain what line of j 
action the divine life within him would impose if \ 
it had all its power — becomes reliable and safe, at : 
any rate far more reliable and safe, becomes ; 
indeed more largely possible in many cases i 
where it was almost impossible before (since in \ 



246 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

some instances of moral crisis the very greatness 
of the crisis seems to paralyse the necessary 
thought) if the Christian sets his mind under the 
direct dominance of the mind of Christ. He may 
not be able to make the entire surrender of per- 
sonality to the living Christ which, by substitut- 
ing the very life of Christ for his own, would 
cause the divine life to govern the situation with 
unfettered power; but if he realise the living 
Christ as actually there, such measure of thought 
as he is still compelled to take, such degree of 
moral self-adjustment as he is still, in the absence 
of a perfect surrender, compelled to perform, will 
win something of success and worth from the in- 
fluences radiating out of the Christly presence. 
When, therefore, we say that the Christian, in 
so far as the ethical ordering of his life remains 
in his own hands, is to govern it under the regula- 
tive idea of the divine life within, we do but say 
in other words that he is to govern it under the 
sway and spell of the mind of Christ. The mind 
of the Christian may be in- great part submitted 
to the mind of Christ, even when it would be 
too much to say that the life of the Christian, as 
a whole, is Christ's and not his own. The Chris- 
tian surmounts his ethical problems, therefore, by 
calling up the living presence of the living Christ 
and submitting himself to its spell. Again, it is no 
magical pass across the ethical difficulties of life 



SUMMAEY— THE IlSrOLtJSIVE EXILE 247 



that is so suggested, but a strictly reasonable 
method of dealing with them all. For all other 
rules this one all-inclusive rule can be substi- 
tuted. In it all the rest are wrapped. And the 
Christian who has taken hold upon what has been 
written through earlier chapters may now say 
(since he will now understand what lies behind 
and what is implied in the saying) that the whole 
ethical programme is summed up in flinging 
himself into Christ, heart into heart, mind into 
mind, soul into soul, life into life. It need not be 
denied that they who employ the phrases con- 
cerning the " living Christ'* in the method not 
unfairly to be described as the method of 
magical incantation, who think of the proper 
attitude towards the living Christ as one of 
heightened emotion and sublimated ecstasy — 
who, in brief, lay more stress upon what goes 
out upon Christ from them than upon what comes 
down to them from Christ — it need not be denied 
that they obtain for the ethical governance of 
their experience something of the help for which 
they hope. For, after all, the living Christ is 
there; and the life-influences starting out from 
Him come even upon human natures not properly 
prepared or set, and do something of their helpful 
work. But the Christian who, in his reliance 
upon the " living Christ," knows the ground of 
his reliance, knows what he expects, knows how 



248 THE CHEISTIAK" METHOD OF ETHICS 



the descending life-influence is to do its work 
and why it is this life-influence that above all he 
needs — he will obtain far more from the living 
Christ than the surrender of mere emotionalism 
can ever win. And so we repeat that, while all 
that has gone before stands sure, the Christian 
who has properly apprehended the method of his 
ethical safeguarding may now substitute this 
one rule for all the rest, and may determine to 
master all his practical problems by calling up the 
living presence of the living Christ and submit- 
ting himself to its spell. 

Ill 

There remains little more to be said. But let 
it be noticed that in this way, and in this way 
alone, is Christ brought into touch (as ah! so 
many Christian men and women are ceaselessly 
longing, and vainly longing, to bring Him into 
touch) with all the practical problems of our day. 
It makes a veritable heart-ache, sometimes, for 
earnest and devout ones to realise that the swift 
movement of the world in which they live, the 
kaleidoscopic changes among the conditions of 
their own individual experience, are carrying 
everything further and further away from the 
world and the experience to which Christ ap- 
pears to belong, and that from His world and 
experience to their own lines of connection are 



SUMMAKY— THE INCLUSIVE EULE 249 

becoming ever more and more difficult to draw. 
The problems of life increase in complexity, and 
He said so little that touches them. Nine-tenths 
of our horizon does not seem to have been within 
His view. There is no word for this, for that, 
for the other situation that baffles us. And yet 
we cannot go through all these things without 
carrying in our hands some talisman which is His 
gift, which will open for us all the doors. If we 
once confessed that we had to do so, it would be 
a confession that our Christ had failed, that He 
is not the Christ for the present day. Even while 
mourning that Christ, as He was, seems some- 
how out of relation with the practical problems 
of life, men and women refuse (with an intense 
passion which shows that they hold themselves, 
not Christ, to be wrong) to believe that He is 
really so. And, pathetically, they strive to bring 
Christ into relation with the conditions of the 
newer time. They talk of imitating His example, 
only to find that in many ranges of life no ex- 
ample was given: they endeavour to discover 
in His utterances general principles which will 
cover the special matter perplexing them, only to 
find that the method satisfies neither them nor 
any others involved in the case. In a hundred 
ways they seek to make the desired contact be- 
tween Christ and the modern time. What if 
Christ be making it Himself, or ready to make it? 



250 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



What if He said so little, because He intended 
to he always what He was then — the Source of 
a life under whose tides of power all practical 
problems would be directly overcome? At any 
rate, under the view we have been taking — ^the 
view which finds in the realisation of the living 
presence of the living Christ, and in submission 
to its spell, the entire ethical programme for man, 
whether as individual or as member of a social 
organism — under this view Christ becomes the 
direct arbiter of the modem world, and will 
retain His place as such through all that may 
happen in the process of the suns. So much, at 
any rate, is gained. 

And this, too, is a helpful word. If this ethical 
method be accepted, then the ultimate ideal (the 
combined religious and ethical ideal) is for- 
warded for the Christian man by his grappling 
with each practical problem as it comes. As he 
faces each problem, he seeks so to fling himself 
into the grip of the Christ-life, coming down 
upon him out of the living Christ Himself, that 
the divine life within him shall decide his course. 
And in so far as this is only incompletely done, 
he seeks at any rate to be so united with the liv- 
ing Christ that such adjustment as he has to 
make shall, through the dominance of his mind 
by the mind of Christ, be taken nearer to truth 
and worth. But this closer union with, or this 



SUMMAEY— THE INCLUSIVE EULE 251 

closer approach to, the divine life in Christ must 
necessarily mark a permanent gain — not, perhaps, 
that the high tide of fellowship with the divine 
life which was reached at the moment of crisis 
will be maintained, but that the tide will not sink 
quite to its former low level again. It is in the 
nature of things that the special effort at surren- 
der which, under the stress of the crisis, the 
Christian has been driven to make, should cause 
the normal measure of his surrender to be 
enlarged. 

So, by every practical crisis, rightly con- 
fronted, is the Christian carried nearer to the 
ultimate goal — the goal of having no life save 
that of God through Christ within him, all prac- 
tical crises being consequently done with and 
passed by. So is there an inter-relation between 
all the affairs of life — the smallest question of 
conduct, once met and conquered, contributing 
something to the Christian's equipment for hours 
of larger import and keener stress, and all to- 
gether, through the successive alternations of 
life-power gained and used and increased through 
the using, making for that final issue of things 
wherein all the ethical ideals shall be automati- 
cally realised in the realisation of the one great 
spiritual ideal. On this view it is upward and 
onward always, and through the smallest move- 
ment of experience no less surely than through 



252 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 

the greatest — the Christian mounting ever on 
stepping-stones of his past self to higher things. 

IV 

The reproach of mysticism may perhaps be 
raised once more against this ethical method at 
the end. Well, what needed to be said as to the 
precise relation between mysticism and practical 
affairs was said on an earlier page. But for the 
rest, let it be admitted that mysticism of a sort 
all this undoubtedly is. And it is mysticism 
unashamed. In the last resort, all that has been 
written depends upon the real livingness of 
Christ to-day — upon His continued possession of 
creative power. It depends, therefore, upon such 
mysticism as this may imply. If Christ be only 
a memory — only a historical Figure that passed 
once, grand in moral stature and sublime in moral 
example, across the world's stage — then it would 
be useless to speak of calling up the living pres- 
ence of the living Christ; and, with the going of 
that, all else in these pages would be gone. But 
if Christ be really, not in any metaphorical or 
poetical sense, but in all literalness, present still 
among men, not as the great dead of the human 
race are present, but in far more intimate ways — 
if it be true that it has been given Him through 
all the ages to have life in Himself — if He can 
unite Himself with men, heart with heart, 



SUMMAEY— THE INCLUSIVE RULE 253 

thought with thought, will with will, soul with 
soul, life with life, till His personality folds itself 
close round theirs, substitutes itself for theirs — 
then all that has been written may stand. It is 
mysticism, perhaps. But it is a mysticism which 
is, as some of us would hold, vital both to the 
Christian religion and to any sound Christian eth- 
ical scheme. It is a mysticism which is the most 
practical thing in all the world. And it is be- 
tween faith in a Christ who was and faith in a 
Christ who is that those who call themselves 
Christians are being more and more insistently 
called upon to choose. 

In the interest of a sound ethical ordering of 
life, no less than in the interest of a rich religious 
experience (for indeed the two are, as repeatedly 
emphasised, really one), it will need to be the 
Christ who is that the Christian retains for his 
worship and his trust. So is it, in the last resort, 
the divine life, in its fact or in its idea — ever 
less and less in its idea and ever more and more 
in its fact — that orders the ways of the Christian 
man. So is it possible for him to see to it that a 
divine life within him shall progressively mani- 
fest itself in, dictate to, and feed itself upon, all 
the ethical activities of his days. So does he re- 
late the ideals to the ideal. So does the man of 
deepest spirituality become the man of swiftest 
and truest aptitude for a correct dealing with 



254 THE CHEISTIAN METHOD OF ETHICS 



practical affairs. And so does the mystic, the 
saint, wrapped in Christ-ward adoration, ab- 
sorbed in Christ-ward communion (so that it be 
a communion wherein the whole man moves out 
to the whole Christ, and the whole Christ comes 
back upon the whole man) find himself, through 
the energising power of that life-sacrament 
whereof he ceaselessly partakes, thoroughly fur- 
nished unto every good work. 



THE END 



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